{"entity":{"id":"pathology-foundation-models","kind":"term","name":"Pathology foundation models: UNI, UNI2, Virchow2, CTransPath, CONCH, TITAN","aka":["UNI2","UNI2-h","Virchow2","CTransPath","TransPath","pathology encoder","tile encoder","histopathology foundation model"],"tldr":"Pathology foundation models are image encoders pretrained without labels on millions of slide tiles; UNI and CONCH come from the Mahmood Lab at Harvard, Virchow from Paige, and CTransPath was an early transformer version.","summary":"UNI, from Chen and colleagues, is a general-purpose self-supervised pathology encoder trained on over a hundred million tiles and evaluated across dozens of tasks; UNI2-h is its larger successor released on Hugging Face under a gated non-commercial licence. Virchow, from Vorontsov and colleagues at Paige, was trained on about 1.5 million slides for clinical-grade and rare cancer detection, with Virchow2 released the same way. CTransPath (Wang and colleagues, 2022) showed contrastive pretraining of a transformer for histology, and CONCH aligns tiles with pathology text; TITAN extends the family to whole slides and reports. Gated weights are open for research but not for products, which is why OnCo records their openness as gated.","asOf":"2026-09-24","links":[{"label":"Chen et al., UNI: towards a general-purpose foundation model for computational pathology (Nature Medicine 2024)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02857-3"},{"label":"UNI2-h on Hugging Face (MahmoodLab)","url":"https://huggingface.co/MahmoodLab/UNI2-h"},{"label":"Vorontsov et al., Virchow: a foundation model for clinical-grade computational pathology (Nature Medicine 2024)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03141-0"},{"label":"Virchow2 on Hugging Face (Paige)","url":"https://huggingface.co/paige-ai/Virchow2"},{"label":"Wang et al., CTransPath: transformer-based unsupervised contrastive learning for histopathological image classification (Medical Image Analysis 2022)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2022.102559"},{"label":"Lu et al., CONCH: a visual-language foundation model for computational pathology (Nature Medicine 2024)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02856-4"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["paige","cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["pathology-foundation-model","titan"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["tile-patch-encoding","abmil","foundation-model","open-weights"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/mahmood-lab."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Methods and models"},"route":"/terms/pathology-foundation-models/","neighbours":{"company":[{"id":"paige","kind":"company","name":"Paige AI","route":"/companies/paige/"}],"term":[{"id":"abmil","kind":"term","name":"Attention-based multiple-instance learning (ABMIL, CLAM)","route":"/terms/abmil/"},{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"foundation-model","kind":"term","name":"Foundation model","route":"/terms/foundation-model/"},{"id":"open-weights","kind":"term","name":"Open weights, open code and gated models","route":"/terms/open-weights/"},{"id":"tile-patch-encoding","kind":"term","name":"Tile and patch encoding of slides","route":"/terms/tile-patch-encoding/"}],"technology":[{"id":"pathology-foundation-model","kind":"technology","name":"Pathology & radiology foundation models","route":"/technologies/pathology-foundation-model/"},{"id":"titan","kind":"technology","name":"TITAN (whole-slide multimodal model)","route":"/technologies/titan/"}]}}