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Main Authors: Li, Dong, Wan, Guihong, Wu, Xintao, Wu, Xinyu, Chen, Xiaohui, He, Yi, Lian, Christine G., Sorger, Peter K., Semenov, Yevgeniy R., Zhao, Chen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09091
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author Li, Dong
Wan, Guihong
Wu, Xintao
Wu, Xinyu
Chen, Xiaohui
He, Yi
Lian, Christine G.
Sorger, Peter K.
Semenov, Yevgeniy R.
Zhao, Chen
author_facet Li, Dong
Wan, Guihong
Wu, Xintao
Wu, Xinyu
Chen, Xiaohui
He, Yi
Lian, Christine G.
Sorger, Peter K.
Semenov, Yevgeniy R.
Zhao, Chen
contents Foundation models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), enabling scalable and generalizable analysis of histopathological images. While early developments centered on uni-modal models trained solely on visual data, recent advances have highlighted the promise of multi-modal foundation models that integrate heterogeneous data sources such as textual reports, structured domain knowledge, and molecular profiles. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of multi-modal foundation models in CPath, with a particular focus on models built upon hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs) and tile-level representations. We categorize 32 state-of-the-art multi-modal foundation models into three major paradigms: vision-language, vision-knowledge graph, and vision-gene expression. We further divide vision-language models into non-LLM-based and LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we analyze 28 available multi-modal datasets tailored for pathology, grouped into image-text pairs, instruction datasets, and image-other modality pairs. Our survey also presents a taxonomy of downstream tasks, highlights training and evaluation strategies, and identifies key challenges and future directions. We aim for this survey to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of pathology and AI.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Computational Pathology: A Survey
Li, Dong
Wan, Guihong
Wu, Xintao
Wu, Xinyu
Chen, Xiaohui
He, Yi
Lian, Christine G.
Sorger, Peter K.
Semenov, Yevgeniy R.
Zhao, Chen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Foundation models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), enabling scalable and generalizable analysis of histopathological images. While early developments centered on uni-modal models trained solely on visual data, recent advances have highlighted the promise of multi-modal foundation models that integrate heterogeneous data sources such as textual reports, structured domain knowledge, and molecular profiles. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of multi-modal foundation models in CPath, with a particular focus on models built upon hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs) and tile-level representations. We categorize 32 state-of-the-art multi-modal foundation models into three major paradigms: vision-language, vision-knowledge graph, and vision-gene expression. We further divide vision-language models into non-LLM-based and LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we analyze 28 available multi-modal datasets tailored for pathology, grouped into image-text pairs, instruction datasets, and image-other modality pairs. Our survey also presents a taxonomy of downstream tasks, highlights training and evaluation strategies, and identifies key challenges and future directions. We aim for this survey to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of pathology and AI.
title Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Computational Pathology: A Survey
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09091