ProFound: A moderate-sized vision foundation model for multi-task prostate imaging

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yipei, Xu, Yinsong, Yi, Weixi, Saeed, Shaheer Ullah, Thorley, Natasha, Ng, Alexander, Zhou, Yukun, Yan, Wen, Barratt, Dean, Punwani, Shonit, Kasivisvanathan, Veeru, Emberton, Mark, Alexander, Daniel C., Hu, Yipeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wang, Yipei
Xu, Yinsong
Yi, Weixi
Saeed, Shaheer Ullah
Thorley, Natasha
Ng, Alexander
Zhou, Yukun
Yan, Wen
Barratt, Dean
Punwani, Shonit
Kasivisvanathan, Veeru
Emberton, Mark
Alexander, Daniel C.
Hu, Yipeng
author_facet Wang, Yipei
Xu, Yinsong
Yi, Weixi
Saeed, Shaheer Ullah
Thorley, Natasha
Ng, Alexander
Zhou, Yukun
Yan, Wen
Barratt, Dean
Punwani, Shonit
Kasivisvanathan, Veeru
Emberton, Mark
Alexander, Daniel C.
Hu, Yipeng
contents Many diagnostic and therapeutic clinical tasks for prostate cancer increasingly rely on multi-parametric MRI. Automating these tasks is challenging because they necessitate expert interpretations, which are difficult to scale to capitalise on modern deep learning. Although modern automated systems achieve expert-level performance in isolated tasks, their general clinical utility remains limited by the requirement of large task-specific labelled datasets. In this paper, we present ProFound, a domain-specialised vision foundation model for volumetric prostate mpMRI. ProFound is pre-trained using several variants of self-supervised approaches on a diverse, multi-institutional collection of 5,000 patients, with a total of over 22,000 unique 3D MRI volumes (over 1,800,000 2D image slices). We conducted a systematic evaluation of ProFound across a broad spectrum of $11$ downstream clinical tasks on over 3,000 independent patients, including prostate cancer detection, Gleason grading, lesion localisation, gland volume estimation, zonal and surrounding structure segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that finetuned ProFound consistently outperforms or remains competitive with state-of-the-art specialised models and existing medical vision foundation models trained/finetuned on the same data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03961
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ProFound: A moderate-sized vision foundation model for multi-task prostate imaging
Wang, Yipei
Xu, Yinsong
Yi, Weixi
Saeed, Shaheer Ullah
Thorley, Natasha
Ng, Alexander
Zhou, Yukun
Yan, Wen
Barratt, Dean
Punwani, Shonit
Kasivisvanathan, Veeru
Emberton, Mark
Alexander, Daniel C.
Hu, Yipeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Many diagnostic and therapeutic clinical tasks for prostate cancer increasingly rely on multi-parametric MRI. Automating these tasks is challenging because they necessitate expert interpretations, which are difficult to scale to capitalise on modern deep learning. Although modern automated systems achieve expert-level performance in isolated tasks, their general clinical utility remains limited by the requirement of large task-specific labelled datasets. In this paper, we present ProFound, a domain-specialised vision foundation model for volumetric prostate mpMRI. ProFound is pre-trained using several variants of self-supervised approaches on a diverse, multi-institutional collection of 5,000 patients, with a total of over 22,000 unique 3D MRI volumes (over 1,800,000 2D image slices). We conducted a systematic evaluation of ProFound across a broad spectrum of $11$ downstream clinical tasks on over 3,000 independent patients, including prostate cancer detection, Gleason grading, lesion localisation, gland volume estimation, zonal and surrounding structure segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that finetuned ProFound consistently outperforms or remains competitive with state-of-the-art specialised models and existing medical vision foundation models trained/finetuned on the same data.
title ProFound: A moderate-sized vision foundation model for multi-task prostate imaging
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03961