The study evaluates whether disease can be identified from reactive, non‑lesional brain tissue in intracranial biopsies. Using four foundation‑model encoders within an attention‑based multiple‑instance learning framework on 245 whole‑slide images, the authors find that disease labels remain predictive even after controlling for slide size and sampling bias, and that performance is similar across all encoders. Signed instance‑contribution maps and expert review confirm that predictive signals localize to reactive parenchyma rather than artifacts such as blood.
"whyItMatters":"The findings demonstrate that weakly supervised models can recover disease signals from tissue traditionally considered non‑diagnostic, highlighting the need for provenance‑only baselines in computational pathology benchmarks."
By Jan Schnorrenberg, Jan Ernsting, Enrico K\"ullenberg, Tim Hahn, Benjamin Risse, Christian Thomas
arXiv:2609.23983v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neuroimaging foundation models pretrained on large, predominantly western cohorts are increasingly proposed as general-purpose backbones for brain MRI...
By Oluwatobi Iyanuoluwa Akinmuleya, Olatokun Shamsudeen Akano, Samuel Danquah Ankapong, Olamide Lawal, Toufiq Musah
arXiv:2609.15888v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Deep networks trained on structural MRI for Alzheimer's disease (AD) staging often reach reasonable accuracy while attending to anatomically irreleva...
By Paul-Gabriel Nicolae, Irina Georgiana Mocanu
The paper introduces TAP-JEPA, a joint‑embedding predictive architecture trained on over 113,000 CT volumes, which achieves performance comparable to leading encoders in scan‑level classification. It demonstrates a predictability bias: while anatomy is largely predictable from context, pathology is not, leading to significant degradation in pathology detection when predictions are applied. The study audits the model’s predictive pathway, showing that pathology representations shift toward control regions and that removing pathology tokens minimally affects downstream decisions, underscoring that contextual predictability alone is insufficient for clinical relevance.
By Fabian Drexel, Bernhard Kainz, Jakob N. Kather, Daniel Rueckert, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem, Cosmin I. Bercea
arXiv:2604. 27277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data.
By Yizhou Wu, Shansong Wang, Yuheng Li, Mojtaba Safari, Mingzhe Hu, Chih-Wei Chang, Harini Veeraraghavan, Xiaofeng Yang
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
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)
Medical vision-language models typically generate diagnoses through single-pass inference without indicating which image regions support their conclusions. This lack of spatial grounding limits clinical utility: outputs cannot be audited, and models may hallucinate findings on normal scans.
The paper introduces DomSet-MIL, a multiple instance learning framework designed to recover evidence of coexisting lesions in whole-slide images when only the most severe diagnosis is weakly supervised. It models the dominant-label mechanism through a censored likelihood that treats the reported diagnosis as the maximum severity without assuming other lesions are absent, and employs severity-ordered residual routing with top‑q pooling to preserve secondary findings. Experiments on natural and controlled datasets show that DomSet-MIL outperforms standard MIL approaches in dominant-label prediction while better recovering latent coexisting-lesion evidence.
By Lubin Gan, Jing Zhang, Xinming Zhang, Chengpeng Xu, Siying Wu, Xiaoyan Sun
BrainFedFM is a structural brain MRI foundation model that was federatively pretrained on 164,707 3‑D scans from 42 sites using a dual‑priority approach that emphasizes informative anatomical regions locally and prioritizes site contributions globally. The model outperformed seven baseline models—including four centralized foundation models—across 20 downstream tasks (classification, regression, segmentation), achieving a mean rank of 1.68 and a 50% performance gain, especially in classification and regression and among underrepresented populations. These results demonstrate the model’s generalizability and show that federated pretraining can effectively develop neuroimaging foundation models without pooling raw images.
By Zhen Yu, Yang Liu, Xiahai Zhuang, Qingchao Chen
arXiv:2606. 00092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Weakly-supervised classification of whole-slide images with attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) on top of foundation features now reaches near-saturation on Camelyon16 slide-level performance, but the corresponding attention maps are an imperfect localization signal: in clinical interpretation, a model that classifies correctly without firing on the actual lesion is hard to trust.
By Devansh Lalwani, Swapnil Bhat, Maulik Shah
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