arXiv subjects

Carlos Cordon-Cardo

Publications and source records attributed to Carlos Cordon-Cardo.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Domain-Specific Foundation Model Improves AI-Based Analysis of Neuropathology

Foundation models have transformed computational pathology by providing generalizable representations from large-scale histology datasets. However, existing models are predominantly trained on surgical pathology data, which is enriched for non-nervous tissue and overrepresents neoplastic, inflammatory, metabolic, and other non-neurological diseases. Neuropathology represents a markedly different domain of histopathology, characterized by unique cell types (neurons, glia, etc.), distinct cytoarchitecture, and disease-specific pathological features including neurofibrillary tangles, amyloid plaques, Lewy bodies, and pattern-specific neurodegeneration. This domain mismatch may limit the ability of general-purpose foundation models to capture the morphological patterns critical for interpreting neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and cerebellar ataxias. To address this gap, we developed NeuroFM, a foundation model trained specifically on whole-slide images of brain tissue spanning diverse neurodegenerative pathologies. NeuroFM demonstrates superior performance compared to general-purpose models across multiple neuropathology-specific downstream tasks, including mixed dementia disease classification, hippocampal region segmentation, and neurodegenerative ataxia identification encompassing cerebellar essential tremor and spinocerebellar ataxia subtypes. This work establishes that domain-specialized foundation models trained on brain tissue can better capture neuropathology-specific features than models trained on general surgical pathology datasets. By tailoring foundation models to the unique morphological landscape of neurodegenerative diseases, NeuroFM enables more accurate and reliable AI-based analysis for brain disease diagnosis and research, setting a precedent for domain-specific model development in specialized areas of digital pathology.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Computational Pathology at Health System Scale -- Self-Supervised Foundation Models from Three Billion Images

Recent breakthroughs in self-supervised learning have enabled the use of large unlabeled datasets to train visual foundation models that can generalize to a variety of downstream tasks. While this training paradigm is well suited for the medical domain where annotations are scarce, large-scale pre-training in the medical domain, and in particular pathology, has not been extensively studied. Previous work in self-supervised learning in pathology has leveraged smaller datasets for both pre-training and evaluating downstream performance. The aim of this project is to train the largest academic foundation model and benchmark the most prominent self-supervised learning algorithms by pre-training and evaluating downstream performance on large clinical pathology datasets. We collected the largest pathology dataset to date, consisting of over 3 billion images from over 423 thousand microscopy slides. We compared pre-training of visual transformer models using the masked autoencoder (MAE) and DINO algorithms. We evaluated performance on six clinically relevant tasks from three anatomic sites and two institutions: breast cancer detection, inflammatory bowel disease detection, breast cancer estrogen receptor prediction, lung adenocarcinoma EGFR mutation prediction, and lung cancer immunotherapy response prediction. Our results demonstrate that pre-training on pathology data is beneficial for downstream performance compared to pre-training on natural images. Additionally, the DINO algorithm achieved better generalization performance across all tasks tested. The presented results signify a phase change in computational pathology research, paving the way into a new era of more performant models based on large-scale, parallel pre-training at the billion-image scale.

cs.CV↗