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)
VGG16-MCA UNet is a hybrid neural network that combines an ImageNet‑pretrained VGG16 encoder with a decoder enhanced by a Multi‑Channel Attention module, trained using Focal Tversky loss to address class imbalance. The model was evaluated as a 2‑D, FLAIR‑only whole‑tumor segmenter on BraTS 2020 and LGG datasets, achieving a pixel‑level Dice of 95.10 % on BraTS and 88.32 % on LGG in a 5‑fold cross‑validation setting. Inference time is 66.32 ms per 256×256 slice on a single RTX 2060, only slightly slower than a VGG16‑UNet without attention.
whyItMatters":"The study provides a reproducible 2‑D FLAIR baseline for whole‑tumor segmentation, demonstrating high Dice scores and detailed reporting of training and evaluation protocols."
By Shubham Gajjar, Deep Joshi, Avi Poptani, Vishal Barot
arXiv:2607. 03253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) staining constitutes the primary entry point in routine diagnostic workflows, computer-aided diagnosis from whole-slide H&E images is of particular clinical relevance.
By Ivica Kopriva, Dario Sitnik, Arijana Pacic, Karolina Krstanac, Irena Veliki Dalic, Marijana Popovic Hadzija
arXiv:2607. 18218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models have emerged as a driving force in computational pathology, with the potential to transform cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment selection by learning transferable representations from large-scale histopathology data.
By Naoto Usuyama, Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, Sicong Yao, Hanwen Xu, Jaspreet Bagga, Guanghui Qin, Robert E. Kramer, Cliff Wong, Soohee Lee, Hao Qiu, Theodore Zhengde Zhao, Racheli Ben Shimol, Angela Crabtree, Kevin Matlock, Eduardo Alejandro Lozano Garcia, Naiteek Sangani, Alberto Santamaria-Pang, Jason Entenmann, Alexandra Q. Bartlett, Bill J. Wright, Bernard A. Fox, Brian Piening, Sheng Zhang, Sheng Wang, Tristan Naumann, Carlo Bifulco, Hoifung Poon
arXiv:2606. 12346v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the cornerstone of histopathology, yet scalable, quantitative analysis of H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a central challenge in computational pathology.
By Kai Standvoss, Miriam H\"agele, Rosemarie Krupar, Julika Ribbat-Idel, Jennifer Altsch\"uler, Gerrit Erdmann, Hans Pinckaers, Evelyn Ramberger, Madleen Drinkwitz, \'Ad\'am N\'arai, Alexander M\"ollers, Katja Lingelbach, Sebastian Kons, Lukas H\"onig, Recepcan Adig\"uzel, Joana Bai\~ao, Alberto Megina Gonzalo, Marius Teodorescu, Marie-Lisa Eich, Paolo Chetta, Shakil Merchant, Verena Aumiller, Simon Schallenberg, Andrew Norgan, Klaus-Robert M\"uller, Lukas Ruff, Maximilian Alber, Frederick Klauschen
arXiv:2609.36429v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Predicting gene expression from H&E-stained histology images offers a scalable alternative to costly spatial transcriptomics, yet most existing methods...
By Zijun Gao, Chunbin Gu, Jinxi Xiang, Xiangde Luo, Pheng-Ann Heng
arXiv:2510.14383v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Accurate brain tumor segmentation is significant for clinical diagnosis and treatment but remains challenging due to tumor heterogeneity. Mamba-bas...
By Danish Ali, Ajmal Mian, Naveed Akhtar, Ghulam Mubashar Hassan
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
arXiv:2607. 00385v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated malaria diagnosis from blood smear microscopy is a critical global health AI challenge; expert scarcity remains the primary diagnostic bottleneck.
By Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md Hasibul Hasan, Mohammed Ali, Tanzilur Rahman
arXiv:2609.00704v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Functional tissue units (FTUs), including tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs), blood vessels, and glands, encode localized immune, vascular, and epithe...
By Zonghao Liu, Lei Su, Jiguang Yu, Xuqing Geng, Louis Shuo Wang, Jianmin Wang, Jingfeng Liu
arXiv:2505.03380v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Accurate delineation of tumors and surrounding organs-at-risk is essential for radiotherapy, surgery and treatment response assessment, yet remains...
By Haonan Wang, Jiaji Mao, Lehan Wang, Qixiang Zhang, Marawan Elbatel, Yi Qin, Huijun Hu, Baoxun Li, Wenhui Deng, Weifeng Qin, Hongrui Li, Jialin Liang, Jun Shen, Xiaomeng Li
arXiv:2607. 00385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated malaria diagnosis from blood smear microscopy is a critical challenge in global health AI; in resource-limited settings, the scarcity of expert microscopists remains the primary bottleneck to timely and accurate diagnosis.
By Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md Hasibul Hasan, Mohammed Ali, Tanzilur Rahman