Benchmarking foundation models as feature extractors for weakly-supervised computational pathology

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Main Authors: Neidlinger, Peter, Nahhas, Omar S. M. El, Muti, Hannah Sophie, Lenz, Tim, Hoffmeister, Michael, Brenner, Hermann, van Treeck, Marko, Langer, Rupert, Dislich, Bastian, Behrens, Hans Michael, Röcken, Christoph, Foersch, Sebastian, Truhn, Daniel, Marra, Antonio, Saldanha, Oliver Lester, Kather, Jakob Nikolas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Neidlinger, Peter
Nahhas, Omar S. M. El
Muti, Hannah Sophie
Lenz, Tim
Hoffmeister, Michael
Brenner, Hermann
van Treeck, Marko
Langer, Rupert
Dislich, Bastian
Behrens, Hans Michael
Röcken, Christoph
Foersch, Sebastian
Truhn, Daniel
Marra, Antonio
Saldanha, Oliver Lester
Kather, Jakob Nikolas
author_facet Neidlinger, Peter
Nahhas, Omar S. M. El
Muti, Hannah Sophie
Lenz, Tim
Hoffmeister, Michael
Brenner, Hermann
van Treeck, Marko
Langer, Rupert
Dislich, Bastian
Behrens, Hans Michael
Röcken, Christoph
Foersch, Sebastian
Truhn, Daniel
Marra, Antonio
Saldanha, Oliver Lester
Kather, Jakob Nikolas
contents Advancements in artificial intelligence have driven the development of numerous pathology foundation models capable of extracting clinically relevant information. However, there is currently limited literature independently evaluating these foundation models on truly external cohorts and clinically-relevant tasks to uncover adjustments for future improvements. In this study, we benchmarked 19 histopathology foundation models on 13 patient cohorts with 6,818 patients and 9,528 slides from lung, colorectal, gastric, and breast cancers. The models were evaluated on weakly-supervised tasks related to biomarkers, morphological properties, and prognostic outcomes. We show that a vision-language foundation model, CONCH, yielded the highest performance when compared to vision-only foundation models, with Virchow2 as close second. The experiments reveal that foundation models trained on distinct cohorts learn complementary features to predict the same label, and can be fused to outperform the current state of the art. An ensemble combining CONCH and Virchow2 predictions outperformed individual models in 55% of tasks, leveraging their complementary strengths in classification scenarios. Moreover, our findings suggest that data diversity outweighs data volume for foundation models. Our work highlights actionable adjustments to improve pathology foundation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_15823
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking foundation models as feature extractors for weakly-supervised computational pathology
Neidlinger, Peter
Nahhas, Omar S. M. El
Muti, Hannah Sophie
Lenz, Tim
Hoffmeister, Michael
Brenner, Hermann
van Treeck, Marko
Langer, Rupert
Dislich, Bastian
Behrens, Hans Michael
Röcken, Christoph
Foersch, Sebastian
Truhn, Daniel
Marra, Antonio
Saldanha, Oliver Lester
Kather, Jakob Nikolas
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Advancements in artificial intelligence have driven the development of numerous pathology foundation models capable of extracting clinically relevant information. However, there is currently limited literature independently evaluating these foundation models on truly external cohorts and clinically-relevant tasks to uncover adjustments for future improvements. In this study, we benchmarked 19 histopathology foundation models on 13 patient cohorts with 6,818 patients and 9,528 slides from lung, colorectal, gastric, and breast cancers. The models were evaluated on weakly-supervised tasks related to biomarkers, morphological properties, and prognostic outcomes. We show that a vision-language foundation model, CONCH, yielded the highest performance when compared to vision-only foundation models, with Virchow2 as close second. The experiments reveal that foundation models trained on distinct cohorts learn complementary features to predict the same label, and can be fused to outperform the current state of the art. An ensemble combining CONCH and Virchow2 predictions outperformed individual models in 55% of tasks, leveraging their complementary strengths in classification scenarios. Moreover, our findings suggest that data diversity outweighs data volume for foundation models. Our work highlights actionable adjustments to improve pathology foundation models.
title Benchmarking foundation models as feature extractors for weakly-supervised computational pathology
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15823