通过相关性引导融合多个病理基础模型,提升癌症分级与分期的准确性和可解释性。
Information-driven Fusion of Pathology Foundation Models for Enhanced Disease Characterization
- 基于特征相关性剔除冗余信息,实现智能融合不同病理基础模型。
- 在肾、前列腺、直肠癌中,融合模型性能优于单个模型和简单拼接。
- 融合后注意力更集中于肿瘤区域,减少对正常组织的误判,适合临床辅助诊断。
基础模型(FMs)在多种病理任务中表现优异。尽管预训练目标相似,但其互补性、嵌入空间冗余性及特征生物学意义仍不明确。本研究提出一种信息驱动的智能融合策略,将多个病理基础模型整合为统一表示,并系统评估其在三种癌症(肾癌519例、前列腺癌490例、直肠癌200例)中的分级与分期性能。考虑了瓦片级模型(Conch v1.5, MUSK, Virchow2, H-Optimus1, Prov-Gigapath)与全切片级模型(TITAN, CHIEF, MADELEINE)。比较了三种融合方式:多数投票集成、简单特征拼接和基于相关性引导的智能融合。在患者分层交叉验证下,智能融合在所有三种癌症中均显著优于最优单模型和简单拼接。全局相似性指标显示模型嵌入空间高度对齐,但局部邻域一致性较低,表明细粒度信息具有互补性。注意力图显示,智能融合聚焦于肿瘤区域,减少对良性区域的误关注。结果表明,相关性引导的智能融合可生成紧凑、任务定制的表示,提升计算病理学任务的预测性能与可解释性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Foundation models (FMs) have demonstrated strong performance across diverse pathology tasks. While there are similarities in the pre-training objectives of FMs, there is still limited understanding of their complementarity, redundancy in embedding spaces, or biological interpretation of features. In this study, we propose an information-driven, intelligent fusion strategy for integrating multiple pathology FMs into a unified representation and systematically evaluate its performance for cancer grading and staging across three distinct diseases. Diagnostic H&E whole-slide images from kidney (519 slides), prostate (490 slides), and rectal (200 slides) cancers were dichotomized into low versus high grade or stage. Both tile-level FMs (Conch v1.5, MUSK, Virchow2, H-Optimus1, Prov-Gigapath) and slide-level FMs (TITAN, CHIEF, MADELEINE) were considered to train downstream classifiers. We then evaluated three FM fusion schemes at both tile and slide levels: majority-vote ensembling, naive feature concatenation, and intelligent fusion based on correlation-guided pruning of redundant features. Under patient-stratified cross-validation with hold-out testing, intelligent fusion of tile-level embeddings yielded consistent gains in classification performance across all three cancers compared with the best single FMs and naive fusion. Global similarity metrics revealed substantial alignment of FM embedding spaces, contrasted by lower local neighborhood agreement, indicating complementary fine-grained information across FMs. Attention maps showed that intelligent fusion yielded concentrated attention on tumor regions while reducing spurious focus on benign regions. Our findings suggest that intelligent, correlation-guided fusion of pathology FMs can yield compact, task-tailored representations that enhance both predictive performance and interpretability in downstream computational pathology tasks.
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