arXiv · 2508.14779
Hospital-Specific Bias in Patch-Based Pathology Models
Abstract
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) achieve strong performance on diverse histopathology tasks, but their sensitivity to hospital-specific domain shifts remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art PFMs on TCGA patch-level datasets and introduce a lightweight adversarial adaptor to remove hospital-related domain information from latent representations. Experiments show that, while disease classification accuracy is largely maintained, the adaptor effectively reduces hospital-specific bias, as confirmed by t-SNE visualizations. Our study establishes a benchmark for assessing cross-hospital robustness in PFMs and provides a practical strategy for enhancing generalization under heterogeneous clinical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/MengRes/pfm_domain_bias.
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Mengliang Zhang. 2025-08-20. Hospital-Specific Bias in Patch-Based Pathology Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14779
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