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)
The paper presents a 3D foundation model for light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSM) that is pretrained on a large curated set of 3D images from various organisms, stains, and imaging protocols. By jointly optimizing for masked reconstruction and image‑text alignment, the model learns transferable volumetric representations that dramatically reduce the need for annotated data. The pretrained backbone enables efficient few‑shot adaptation to downstream tasks such as segmentation, classification, and deblurring, consistently outperforming baselines according to standard metrics and expert evaluation.
By Adina Scheinfeld, Haotan Zhang, Shang Mu, Rudolf L. M. van Herten, Lucas Stoffl, Ali Erturk, Zhuhao Wu, Johannes C. Paetzold
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
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