arXiv Machine Learning

Morphology signal in whole slide image foundation models can automatically triage slides

The paper introduces a pipeline that uses publicly available whole slide image foundation models (FMs) to automatically triage slides by ranking them based on zero‑shot classification predictions. This approach accurately identifies slides containing the most tumor, achieving top‑2 ranking for patients with up to 43 slides across multiple datasets. The study also proposes a ranked evaluation framework to benchmark FM performance in slide triage.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

WILSON - a pathology foundation model framework for patient-level analysis and diagnostic text generation

WILSON is a vision–language foundation model that represents whole‑slide images and multi‑slide patient cases as single multi‑magnification composite images. Trained on about 189,000 Mayo Clinic slides covering 42 organs and 829 diagnostic entities, it outperforms dedicated case‑level models on internal cohorts and matches slide‑level models while using far less compute. Fine‑tuning on triple‑negative breast cancer data improves histologic subtyping and lymphocyte grading, and the model retrieves diagnostic text with high recall and generates captions closer to report references than prior methods.

By Saghir Alfasly, Wataru Uegami, Sobhan Hemati, Wenchao Han, Xiaojia Tang, Kevin Thompson, Daniel Stone, Ghazal Alabtah, Saba Yasir, Michael R. Lucas, Eric W. Klee, Cheryl L. Willman, Judy C. Boughey, Matthew P. Goetz, Krishna R. Kalari, H. R. Tizhoosh
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

Exploiting Spatial Structure for Transductive Few-Shot Classification of Whole-Slide Images

The paper introduces SlideTIM, a transductive few‑shot classification method tailored for whole‑slide images (WSIs). SlideTIM extends the LC‑TIM approach by adding a spatial‑latent regularizer and a class‑distribution prior, ensuring that spatially and semantically similar patches receive consistent predictions and that predicted class proportions are calibrated. Experiments on four histology datasets show that SlideTIM outperforms existing TIM variants, boosting macro‑F1 scores by up to 8.1 percentage points over the best baseline and 19.4 percentage points over zero‑shot predictions at one shot.

By Tiffanie Godelaine, Manon Dausort, Karim El Khoury, Beno\^it G\'erin, Beno\^it Macq, Christophe De Vleeschouwer
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

LanGuSTE: Language-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Patch Selection for Efficient Whole Slide Image Analysis

LanGuSTE is a patch‑selection framework for whole slide image analysis that uses vision‑language models and large language model knowledge. It introduces Cross‑Scale Visual Prompt Tuning to align low‑resolution and high‑resolution patches, and a coarse‑to‑fine selection module that encodes only informative high‑resolution patches. Experiments show LanGuSTE cuts overall processing time to about one‑third of the baseline while matching or surpassing diagnostic performance of exhaustive and state‑of‑the‑art methods.

By Yonghan Shin, Gangsu Kim, Won-Ki Jeong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

HERO: Histology Encoder for Robust Representation in Oncology

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 Computer Vision
Sep 11

PathoHR: Breast Cancer Survival Prediction on High-Resolution Pathological Images

PathoHR is a new pipeline for predicting breast cancer survival from high‑resolution pathological images. It uses a plug‑and‑play Vision Transformer to enhance patch‑wise whole slide image representations, evaluates multiple similarity metrics to optimize feature learning, and shows that smaller, enhanced patches can match or surpass the accuracy of larger raw patches while cutting computational cost. The authors provide experimental evidence that this approach improves both accuracy and efficiency in computational pathology.

By Yang Luo, Shiru Wang, Jun Liu, Jiaxuan Xiao, Rundong Xue, Zeyu Zhang, Hao Zhang, Yu Lu, Yang Zhao, Yutong Xie
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Do Center Biases Propagate? Robustness of Pathology Foundation Models in Whole-Slide Image Classification

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