Glo-VLMs: Leveraging Vision-Language Models for Fine-Grained Diseased Glomerulus Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Guo, Zhenhao, Saluja, Rachit, Yao, Tianyuan, Liu, Quan, Huo, Yuankai, Liechty, Benjamin, Pisapia, David J., Ikemura, Kenji, Sabuncu, Mert R., Yang, Yihe, Deng, Ruining
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Guo, Zhenhao
Saluja, Rachit
Yao, Tianyuan
Liu, Quan
Huo, Yuankai
Liechty, Benjamin
Pisapia, David J.
Ikemura, Kenji
Sabuncu, Mert R.
Yang, Yihe
Deng, Ruining
author_facet Guo, Zhenhao
Saluja, Rachit
Yao, Tianyuan
Liu, Quan
Huo, Yuankai
Liechty, Benjamin
Pisapia, David J.
Ikemura, Kenji
Sabuncu, Mert R.
Yang, Yihe
Deng, Ruining
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown considerable potential in digital pathology, yet their effectiveness remains limited for fine-grained, disease-specific classification tasks such as distinguishing between glomerular subtypes. The subtle morphological variations among these subtypes, combined with the difficulty of aligning visual patterns with precise clinical terminology, make automated diagnosis in renal pathology particularly challenging. In this work, we explore how large pretrained VLMs can be effectively adapted to perform fine-grained glomerular classification, even in scenarios where only a small number of labeled examples are available. In this work, we introduce Glo-VLMs, a systematic framework designed to explore the adaptation of VLMs to fine-grained glomerular classification in data-constrained settings. Our approach leverages curated pathology images alongside clinical text prompts to facilitate joint image-text representation learning for nuanced renal pathology subtypes. By assessing various VLMs architectures and adaptation strategies under a few-shot learning paradigm, we explore how both the choice of method and the amount of labeled data impact model performance in clinically relevant scenarios. To ensure a fair comparison, we evaluate all models using standardized multi-class metrics, aiming to clarify the practical requirements and potential of large pretrained models for specialized clinical research applications. As a result, fine-tuning the VLMs achieved 0.7416 accuracy, 0.9045 macro-AUC, and 0.5277 F1-score with only 8 shots per class, demonstrating that even with highly limited supervision, foundation models can be effectively adapted for fine-grained medical image classification.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Glo-VLMs: Leveraging Vision-Language Models for Fine-Grained Diseased Glomerulus Classification
Guo, Zhenhao
Saluja, Rachit
Yao, Tianyuan
Liu, Quan
Huo, Yuankai
Liechty, Benjamin
Pisapia, David J.
Ikemura, Kenji
Sabuncu, Mert R.
Yang, Yihe
Deng, Ruining
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown considerable potential in digital pathology, yet their effectiveness remains limited for fine-grained, disease-specific classification tasks such as distinguishing between glomerular subtypes. The subtle morphological variations among these subtypes, combined with the difficulty of aligning visual patterns with precise clinical terminology, make automated diagnosis in renal pathology particularly challenging. In this work, we explore how large pretrained VLMs can be effectively adapted to perform fine-grained glomerular classification, even in scenarios where only a small number of labeled examples are available. In this work, we introduce Glo-VLMs, a systematic framework designed to explore the adaptation of VLMs to fine-grained glomerular classification in data-constrained settings. Our approach leverages curated pathology images alongside clinical text prompts to facilitate joint image-text representation learning for nuanced renal pathology subtypes. By assessing various VLMs architectures and adaptation strategies under a few-shot learning paradigm, we explore how both the choice of method and the amount of labeled data impact model performance in clinically relevant scenarios. To ensure a fair comparison, we evaluate all models using standardized multi-class metrics, aiming to clarify the practical requirements and potential of large pretrained models for specialized clinical research applications. As a result, fine-tuning the VLMs achieved 0.7416 accuracy, 0.9045 macro-AUC, and 0.5277 F1-score with only 8 shots per class, demonstrating that even with highly limited supervision, foundation models can be effectively adapted for fine-grained medical image classification.
title Glo-VLMs: Leveraging Vision-Language Models for Fine-Grained Diseased Glomerulus Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15960