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
Frozen hematology foundation-model (FM) embeddings reach near-saturated in-domain white-blood-cell (WBC) accuracy, but clinical deployment demands reliability across scanners, sites, stains and prepar...
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 study evaluated whole‑slide image classifiers for gastric cancer across five Korean hospitals, using foundation‑model features and leave‑one‑hospital‑out validation. A hierarchical patch‑region‑slide graph aggregator (CHIME‑MIL) with site alignment and two‑scale fusion achieved a mean AUC of 0.837, outperforming six conventional attention and transformer aggregators that lacked these steps. However, when matched with the same alignment and fusion, CHIME‑MIL did not surpass simple attention‑based pooling, and global max pooling performed best (AUC 0.855). The alignment step, which subtracts each hospital’s mean feature vector without labels, enabled onboarding of a new hospital from only ten unlabeled slides but yielded only a modest 0.002 AUC improvement, and the model’s accuracy gains were inconsistent.
"whyItMatters":"The findings show that adding complex aggregation methods does not necessarily improve cross‑hospital discrimination, highlighting the importance of simpler, label‑free onboarding and calibration checks for deployable pathology systems."
By Nheng Vanchhay, Ali Hussain, Khan Ziaullah, Moon-Il Joo, Md Ariful Islam Mozumder, Rashedul Islam Sumon, Won-Ae Lee, Min-Sun Cho, Hyeong-Chan Shin, Yujun Park, Baek Hwan Cho, Nam-Hoon Cho, Heejung An, Heung-Kook Choi, Haeyoun Kang, Hyunki Kim, Hee Cheol Kim
DINO-Med introduces a patch‑based framework that adapts natural‑image foundation models, specifically DINOv3, to multi‑modal medical imaging. The method uses training‑free registration, automated localization, and mask‑filtered patch extraction to aggregate patch‑level features into subject‑level diagnostics. In liver fibrosis staging, DINOv3 outperforms handcrafted radiomics, ResNet, and SAM‑Med2D features, achieving 78.4% accuracy for mild fibrosis (S1) and 75.8% for cirrhosis (S4) on the CARE 2025 cohort.
By Boya Wang, Ruizhe Li, Chao Chen, Xin Chen
arXiv:2407. 13632v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deploying deep learning-based imaging tools across various clinical sites poses significant challenges due to inherent domain shifts and regulatory hurdles associated with site-specific fine-tuning.
By Abhijeet Parida, Antonia Alomar, Zhifan Jiang, Pooneh Roshanitabrizi, Austin Tapp, Maria Ledesma-Carbayo, Ziyue Xu, Syed Muhammed Anwar, Marius George Linguraru, Holger R. Roth