Scanner variation changes how pathology foundation models represent the same tissue. We introduce SlideRuler, which uses regions within a slide as internal controls to estimate and correct acquisition...
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:2609.24116v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Although deep learning has advanced Whole Slide Image (WSI) Analysis, tissue artifacts like bubbles and folds often cause silent failures by concealing...
By Hyeseong Lee, Eunsu Kim, D M Bappy, Ho Heon Kim, Youngsuk Lee, Se Young Chun, Jang-Hwan Choi, Sung Hak Lee, Sangjeong Ahn
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:2609.36407v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Cross-resolution knowledge distillation aims to improve low-magnification whole- slide analysis by transferring high-magnification representations, yet...
By Zhiyuan Yang, Jiahao Cheng, Mahdi S. Hosseini
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
Lumen is a pathology vision‑language model that aligns frozen unimodal foundation models (Virchow2 and BioMedBERT) using rank‑4 adapters and projection heads, training only 0.40% of the total parameters on the QUILT‑1M corpus. It achieves the highest mean chance‑corrected balanced accuracy (0.546) across nine zero‑shot patch benchmarks and demonstrates strong performance on lymph‑node metastasis detection, with AUROC scores of 0.964 internally and 0.955 externally. While it ranks third in cross‑modal retrieval, Lumen’s low‑parameter training yields competitive results at both patch and slide levels.
By Kiarash Tajbakhsh, Abdelrahman Faqieh, Michael Jopiti, Javier Garcia-Baroja, Philipp Zens, Branislav Zagrapan, Yuri Tolkach, Martin D. Berger, Aurel Perren, Bastian Dislich, Inti Zlobec, Amjad Khan
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: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
arXiv:2606. 07590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models are pretrained on large streams of WSI-derived patches, while supervision during data construction is often slide-level, sparse, or heterogeneous.
By Mingyi He, Xinyi Guo, Xitong Ling, Weiming Chen, Jiawen Li, Lianghui Zhu, Minxi Ouyang, Mingxi Fu, Yizhi Wang, Tian Guan
arXiv:2609.00396v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Histopathological whole slide images (WSIs) are central to cancer diagnosis, but their gigapixel scale, tissue heterogeneity, weak slide-level supervis...
By Chad Wong, Sicheng Chen, Tianyi Zhang, Enhui Chai, Yueming Jin, Zeyu Liu, Fei Xia
The study evaluates 15 frozen hematology foundation-model embeddings across four single‑cell acquisition domains, finding that while in‑domain accuracy is near‑saturated (macro‑F1 0.98–0.997), cross‑dataset performance drops dramatically (34–72%) and model rankings shift. Probe‑dependent rank transfer is observed, with 1‑NN retrieval more stable than linear heads, yet neither reliably predicts target robustness. Calibration deteriorates off‑domain (ECE rises from 0.004 to 0.35), and exposure to internal cohorts confounds shift analysis; a training‑free pseudo‑label‑balanced feature normalization (CBR) modestly improves target‑prior robustness and calibration.
whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that frozen hematology foundation models, though accurate in‑domain, may fail under realistic scanner, site, and class‑prior shifts, underscoring the need for comprehensive audits of accuracy, calibration, exposure, and robustness before clinical deployment."
By Jai Kumar Sharma, Peeyush Tapadiya