arXiv AI
Sep 24

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.

By Il\'an Carretero, Pablo Meseguer, Roc\'io del Amor, Valery Naranjo
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 Computer Vision
Sep 30

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)