A foundation model for clinical-grade computational pathology and rare cancers detection

The analysis of histopathology images with artificial intelligence aims to enable clinical decision support systems and precision medicine. The success of such applications depends on the ability to model the diverse patterns observed in pathology images. To this end, we present Virchow, the largest foundation model for computational pathology to date. In addition to the evaluation of biomarker prediction and cell identification, we demonstrate that a large foundation model enables pan-cancer detection, achieving 0.95 specimen-level area under the (receiver operating characteristic) curve across nine common and seven rare cancers. Furthermore, we show that with less training data, the pan-cancer detector built on Virchow can achieve similar performance to tissue-specific clinical-grade models in production and outperform them on some rare variants of cancer. Virchow's performance gains highlight the value of a foundation model and open possibilities for many high-impact applications with limited amounts of labeled training data.

Indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 39039250 (DOI 10.1038/s41591-024-03141-0). Matched by DOI alone: two technology pages cite this DOI among their external links (the pages are listed under Related), and this page was written so that the citation resolves inside OnCo. No figure has been checked by an editor.