HERO (Histology Encoder for Robust Representation in Oncology) is a ViT‑G/14 pathology foundation model trained with DINO and iBOT objectives and refined using high‑resolution Gram anchoring on a 500‑million‑tile corpus from about 575,000 clinical whole‑slide images. It demonstrates superior robustness to center, scanner, and stain variation compared to other state‑of‑the‑art foundation models, while maintaining competitive performance on tile‑level classification, segmentation, and gene‑expression prediction. Across 39 slide‑level clinical tasks, HERO ranks first on average and achieves the best average rank across six benchmark frameworks under an equal‑weighted analysis.
By Zhi Li (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Eghbal Amidi (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Yating Cheng (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Tyson Dawson (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Gorkem Can Ates (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Shuzhen Kuang (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Norsang Lama (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Md Ashequr Rahman (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Zhiying Lu (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Elisabeth K. Kong (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Milan Radovich (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), David Spetzler (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Matthew Oberley (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), George W. Sledge (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Ming Chen (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States)
arXiv:2601. 05148v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models substantially advanced the possibilities in computational pathology --- yet tradeoffs in terms of performance, robustness, and computational requirements remained, which limited their clinical deployment.
By Maximilian Alber, Timo Milbich, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Stephan Tietz, Jonas Dippel, Lukas Muttenthaler, Beatriz Perez Cancer, Alessandro Benetti, Panos Korfiatis, Elias Eulig, J\'er\^ome L\"uscher, Jiasen Wu, Sayed Abid Hashimi, Gabriel Dernbach, Simon Schallenberg, Neelay Shah, Moritz Kr\"ugener, Aniruddh Jammoria, Jake Matras, Patrick Duffy, Matt Redlon, Philipp Jurmeister, David Horst, Lukas Ruff, Klaus-Robert M\"uller, Frederick Klauschen, Andrew Norgan
arXiv:2607. 22861v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models (FMs) produce powerful tile-level representations which remain sensitive to scanner and staining variability, undermining deployment across laboratories.
By Alexandre Filiot, Oskar Thaeter, Benoit Schmauch, Lionel Guillou
arXiv:2608. 03990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic histopathology image generation has emerged as an approach that may address data scarcity in computational pathology, yet current evaluation methodologies may not fully assess synthetic data quality for medical applications.
By Seyed Kahaki, Shijie Li, Weijie Chen, Nicholas Petrick
arXiv:2607. 25497v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models encode non-biological variation introduced by tissue preparation, staining and scanning, enabling shortcut learning that undermines generalisation across institutions.
By Cl\'ement Grisi, Jeroen van der Laak, Geert Litjens
The paper introduces "Destroy Me", a hybrid framework that generates realistic histopathology artifacts using Stable Diffusion and physics‑based modeling to create six common artifact types. Artifact realism is evaluated with KID and color Wasserstein metrics, and models trained on these augmented images outperform baselines on lung adenocarcinoma classification, achieving a 10.5% relative boost in macro F1‑score and a 15% increase in Cohen’s Kappa. The study highlights that selective, impact‑weighted augmentation is essential for enhancing robustness while preserving subtle diagnostic features.
By Zuzanna Krawczyk-Borysiak, Adam Krawczyk, Mateusz Miller, Gabriela Kaczmarek, S{\l}awomir Paku{\l}o, Ma{\l}gorzata Sok\'o{\l}, \.Zaneta Swiderska-Chadaj
The study investigates whether pathology foundation models (PFMs) carry center-related biases into whole-slide image (WSI) classification. By training models with increasing class-center correlations and evaluating six PFMs across four datasets and two MIL aggregators, the authors introduce the Area Under the Cramér's V Curve (AUCC) to measure both accuracy and degradation due to spurious correlations. Results reveal that center information propagates to WSI predictions, with robustness varying by PFM and MIL strategy, and that ComBat harmonization does not consistently improve robustness.
By Il\'an Carretero, Pablo Meseguer, Roc\'io del Amor, Valery Naranjo
arXiv:2607. 25497v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models are approaching clinical deployment, yet remain vulnerable to systematic non-biological variation across centres.
By Cl\'ement Grisi, Jeroen van der Laak, Geert Litjens
arXiv:2601. 08127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Expert-annotated training data remains the critical bottleneck for AI in histopathology, particularly for rare pathologies where even dozens of cases may be unavailable.
By Mohamad Koohi-Moghadam, Mohammad-Ali Nikouei Mahani, Rex K. H. Au-Yeung, Raymond Yu O, Monalyn Marabi, Piyapharom Intarawichian, Fabian Z. X. Lean, Andrew Ferguson, Kyongtae Tyler Bae
arXiv:2608. 05960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Routine CT interpretation is inherently comprehensive, capturing incidental findings across the entire scan volume.
By Maulik Chevli, Johannes Brandt, Rickmer Braren, Daniel Rueckert, Philip M\"uller
The paper introduces CoPath, a lightweight framework for diagnosing peripheral neuroblastic tumors (pNTs) from whole-slide images. CoPath combines CoHisNet, a multi‑scale feature‑fusion network that replaces traditional MLPs with Kolmogorov‑Arnold Network layers for efficient nonlinear modeling, and PathVote, which aggregates patch‑level predictions using pathology‑informed priors. Experiments on a private pNT cohort and the public BreakHis dataset show that CoPath matches or surpasses existing classifiers while reducing computational complexity.
By Zhu Zhu, Shuo Jiang, Jingyuan Zheng, Yawen Li, Yifei Chen, Manli Zhao, Weizhong Gu, Feiwei Qin, Jinhu Wang, Gang Yu
arXiv:2606. 06983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computational pathology requires visual representations that transfer across diverse clinical endpoints and remain robust to variation in magnification, staining, scanner type, slide preparation, and input resolution.
By Bokai Zhao, Yiyang Zhang, Long Bai, Tai Ma, Hanqing Chao, Minfeng Xu