首次系统评估病理大模型对技术伪影的鲁棒性,发现不鲁棒会导致诊断错误。
Towards Robust Foundation Models for Digital Pathology
- 构建路径学鲁棒性评测基准PathoROB,含3项新指标和4个数据集
- 20个病理大模型均存在鲁棒性缺陷,部分模型诊断错误率超30%
- 通过后处理增强可降低错误风险,但需将鲁棒性纳入模型设计核心
生物医学基础模型(FMs)正快速推动医疗AI研究并进入临床验证阶段。然而,它们易受非生物性技术特征影响——如手术/内镜技术、实验室流程和扫描仪硬件差异——这威胁临床部署安全。本文首次系统研究病理学基础模型对非生物特征的鲁棒性。工作包含三方面:(i) 提出量化鲁棒性的度量方法,(ii) 揭示鲁棒性不足带来的后果,(iii) 提出鲁棒化框架以缓解问题。具体地,我们开发了PathoROB基准,包含3项新指标(如鲁棒性指数)和覆盖34家医疗机构、28个生物类别、4个数据集。实验表明,所有20个评估的基础模型均存在鲁棒性缺陷,且表现差异显著。非鲁棒的表征会引发重大下游诊断错误和临床误判,阻碍安全应用。使用更鲁棒的模型或后处理鲁棒化可显著降低(但未完全消除)此类风险。本研究确立了在临床应用前评估鲁棒性的必要性,并指出未来基础模型开发必须将鲁棒性作为核心设计原则。PathoROB为跨生物医学领域评估鲁棒性提供了蓝图,引导模型改进朝向更鲁棒、更具代表性、可临床部署的AI系统发展。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Biomedical Foundation Models (FMs) are rapidly transforming AI-enabled healthcare research and entering clinical validation. However, their susceptibility to learning non-biological technical features -- including variations in surgical/endoscopic techniques, laboratory procedures, and scanner hardware -- poses risks for clinical deployment. We present the first systematic investigation of pathology FM robustness to non-biological features. Our work (i) introduces measures to quantify FM robustness, (ii) demonstrates the consequences of limited robustness, and (iii) proposes a framework for FM robustification to mitigate these issues. Specifically, we developed PathoROB, a robustness benchmark with three novel metrics, including the robustness index, and four datasets covering 28 biological classes from 34 medical centers. Our experiments reveal robustness deficits across all 20 evaluated FMs, and substantial robustness differences between them. We found that non-robust FM representations can cause major diagnostic downstream errors and clinical blunders that prevent safe clinical adoption. Using more robust FMs and post-hoc robustification considerably reduced (but did not yet eliminate) the risk of such errors. This work establishes that robustness evaluation is essential for validating pathology FMs before clinical adoption and demonstrates that future FM development must integrate robustness as a core design principle. PathoROB provides a blueprint for assessing robustness across biomedical domains, guiding FM improvement efforts towards more robust, representative, and clinically deployable AI systems that prioritize biological information over technical artifacts.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。