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: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
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