A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have enabled robust generalization in computational pathology through large-scale datasets and expansive architectures, but their substantial computational cost, particularly for gigapixel whole slide images, limits clinical accessibility and scalability. Here, we present LitePath, a deployment-friendly foundational framework designed to mitigate model over-parameterization and patch level redundancy. LitePath integrates LiteFM, a compact model distilled from three large PFMs (Virchow2, H-Optimus-1 and UNI2) using 190 million patches, and the Adaptive Patch Selector (APS), a lightweight component for task-specific patch selection. The framework reduces model parameters by 28x and lowers FLOPs by 403.5x relative to Virchow2, enabling deployment on low-power edge hardware such as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. On this device, LitePath processes 208 slides per hour, 104.5x faster than Virchow2, and consumes 0.36 kWh per 3,000 slides, 171x lower than Virchow2 on an RTX3090 GPU. We validated accuracy using 37 cohorts across four organs and 26 tasks (26 internal, 9 external, and 2 prospective), comprising 15,672 slides from 9,808 patients disjoint from the pretraining data. LitePath ranks second among 19 evaluated models and outperforms larger models including H-Optimus-1, mSTAR, UNI2 and GPFM, while retaining 99.71% of the AUC of Virchow2 on average. To quantify the balance between accuracy and efficiency, we propose the Deployability Score (D-Score), defined as the weighted geometric mean of normalized AUC and normalized FLOP, where LitePath achieves the highest value, surpassing Virchow2 by 10.64%. These results demonstrate that LitePath enables rapid, cost-effective and energy-efficient pathology image analysis on accessible hardware while maintaining accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art PFMs and reducing the carbon footprint of AI deployment.

PathBench: A comprehensive comparison benchmark for pathology foundation models towards precision oncology

The emergence of pathology foundation models has revolutionized computational histopathology, enabling highly accurate, generalized whole-slide image analysis for improved cancer diagnosis, and prognosis assessment. While these models show remarkable potential across cancer diagnostics and prognostics, their clinical translation faces critical challenges including variability in optimal model across cancer types, potential data leakage in evaluation, and lack of standardized benchmarks. Without rigorous, unbiased evaluation, even the most advanced PFMs risk remaining confined to research settings, delaying their life-saving applications. Existing benchmarking efforts remain limited by narrow cancer-type focus, potential pretraining data overlaps, or incomplete task coverage. We present PathBench, the first comprehensive benchmark addressing these gaps through: multi-center in-hourse datasets spanning common cancers with rigorous leakage prevention, evaluation across the full clinical spectrum from diagnosis to prognosis, and an automated leaderboard system for continuous model assessment. Our framework incorporates large-scale data, enabling objective comparison of PFMs while reflecting real-world clinical complexity. All evaluation data comes from private medical providers, with strict exclusion of any pretraining usage to avoid data leakage risks. We have collected 15,888 WSIs from 8,549 patients across 10 hospitals, encompassing over 64 diagnosis and prognosis tasks. Currently, our evaluation of 19 PFMs shows that Virchow2 and H-Optimus-1 are the most effective models overall. This work provides researchers with a robust platform for model development and offers clinicians actionable insights into PFM performance across diverse clinical scenarios, ultimately accelerating the translation of these transformative technologies into routine pathology practice.

Federated contrastive learning models for prostate cancer diagnosis and Gleason grading

The application effect of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of medical imaging is remarkable. Robust AI model training requires large datasets, but data collection faces communication, ethics, and privacy protection constraints. Fortunately, federated learning can solve the above problems by coordinating multiple clients to train the model without sharing the original data. In this study, we design a federated contrastive learning framework (FCL) for large-scale pathology images and the heterogeneity challenges. It enhances the model's generalization ability by maximizing the attention consistency between the local client and server models. To alleviate the privacy leakage problem when transferring parameters and verify the robustness of FCL, we use differential privacy to further protect the model by adding noise. We evaluate the effectiveness of FCL on the cancer diagnosis task and Gleason grading task on 19,635 prostate cancer WSIs from multiple clients. In the diagnosis task, the average AUC of 7 clients is 95% when the categories are relatively balanced, and our FCL achieves 97%. In the Gleason grading task, the average Kappa of 6 clients is 0.74, and the Kappa of FCL reaches 0.84. Furthermore, we also validate the robustness of the model on external datasets(one public dataset and two private datasets). In addition, to better explain the classification effect of the model, we show whether the model focuses on the lesion area by drawing a heatmap. Finally, FCL brings a robust, accurate, low-cost AI training model to biomedical research, effectively protecting medical data privacy.

Blind deblurring for microscopic pathology images using deep learning networks

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered pathology is a revolutionary step in the world of digital pathology and shows great promise to increase both diagnosis accuracy and efficiency. However, defocus and motion blur can obscure tissue or cell characteristics hence compromising AI algorithms'accuracy and robustness in analyzing the images. In this paper, we demonstrate a deep-learning-based approach that can alleviate the defocus and motion blur of a microscopic image and output a sharper and cleaner image with retrieved fine details without prior knowledge of the blur type, blur extent and pathological stain. In this approach, a deep learning classifier is first trained to identify the image blur type. Then, two encoder-decoder networks are trained and used alone or in combination to deblur the input image. It is an end-to-end approach and introduces no corrugated artifacts as traditional blind deconvolution methods do. We test our approach on different types of pathology specimens and demonstrate great performance on image blur correction and the subsequent improvement on the diagnosis outcome of AI algorithms.