The field of computational pathology has been transformed with recent advances in foundation models that encode histopathology region-of-interests (ROIs) into versatile and transferable feature representations via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, translating these advancements to address complex clinical challenges at the patient and slide level remains constrained by limited clinical data in disease-specific cohorts, especially for rare clinical conditions. We propose TITAN, a multimodal whole slide foundation model pretrained using 335,645 WSIs via visual self-supervised learning and vision-language alignment with corresponding pathology reports and 423,122 synthetic captions generated from a multimodal generative AI copilot for pathology. Without any finetuning or requiring clinical labels, TITAN can extract general-purpose slide representations and generate pathology reports that generalize to resource-limited clinical scenarios such as rare disease retrieval and cancer prognosis. We evaluate TITAN on diverse clinical tasks and find that TITAN outperforms both ROI and slide foundation models across machine learning settings such as linear probing, few-shot and zero-shot classification, rare cancer retrieval and cross-modal retrieval, and pathology report generation.
@article{arxiv.2411.19666,
title = {Multimodal Whole Slide Foundation Model for Pathology},
author = {Tong Ding and Sophia J. Wagner and Andrew H. Song and Richard J. Chen and Ming Y. Lu and Andrew Zhang and Anurag J. Vaidya and Guillaume Jaume and Muhammad Shaban and Ahrong Kim and Drew F. K. Williamson and Bowen Chen and Cristina Almagro-Perez and Paul Doucet and Sharifa Sahai and Chengkuan Chen and Daisuke Komura and Akihiro Kawabe and Shumpei Ishikawa and Georg Gerber and Tingying Peng and Long Phi Le and Faisal Mahmood},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.19666},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
The code is accessible at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/TITAN