arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

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
2d ago

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 Machine Learning
Sep 3

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.

By Ayushi Sinha, Shashank Yadav, Benjamin Holmes, Pravat Das, Aaron W. Bogan, James S. Lewis Jr., Santiago Romero-Brufau, Andrew Y. K. Foong, Scott H. Kaufmann, Kathryn M. Van Abel, David M. Routman, Michael R. Lucas
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

LadderMIL: Multiple Instance Learning with Coarse-to-Fine Self-Distillation

arXiv:2502.02707v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) for whole slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology often neglects instance-level learning as supervis...

By Shuyang Wu, Yifu Qiu, Ines P. Nearchou, Sandrine Prost, Jonathan A. Fallowfield, Hideki Ueno, Hitoshi Tsuda, David J. Harrison, Hakan Bilen, Timothy J. Kendall
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 AI
Sep 1

Towards Accurate and Lightweight Peripheral Neuroblastic Tumor Diagnosis via Contrastive Multi-scale Pathological Image Analysis

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