A Comprehensive Collection of Whole Slide Image Analysis and Pathology Foundation Models
🌐 Website • 📖 Our Survey • 📚 Curated Papers • 🔧 Toolboxes • 📊 Datasets • 🏆 Benchmarks
Interactive survey companion for pathology foundation models, evaluation tasks, curated papers, toolboxes, datasets, and benchmarks.
| 📅 Timeline | 🎉 What's New |
|---|---|
| 🔔 May 2026 | Interactive Website Added! 🌐 A static website is now included for browsing the survey companion, foundation model explorer, evaluation matrix, curated papers, toolboxes, datasets, and benchmarks. Open it here: 🌐 Awesome WSI Website. |
| 🔔 May 2026 | Structured Data, Resources, and Official Links Updated! 📄 The survey citation now links to the official IJCAI proceedings page, PDF, and DOI. The Toolboxes, Datasets, and Benchmarks sections have been expanded with verified resources and migrated to structured JSON, together with the core tables and curated papers, so the README can be rendered consistently from data sources. Conference placeholders for upcoming curated paper sections have also been prepared. |
| 🔔 Oct 2025 | Toolboxes, Datasets, Benchmarks Online! 📑 The rest of the planned contents are online, available in 🔧 Useful Toolboxes, 📊 Datasets, and 🏆 Benchmarks! Check them out as we will update them regularly! |
| 🔔 July 2025 | Curated Papers Online! 📑 The curated paper section is online, and available in 📚 Curated Papers. More papers are coming and check it out! |
| 🌟 June 2025 | Survey Materials Organized! 📑 All materials related to our comprehensive survey have been carefully organized and are now available in 📑 Our Survey. More exciting updates coming your way soon! |
| 🚀 June 2025 | Repository Structure Finalized! 🎯 We've established the perfect organizational structure for this repository. Everything is now in its right place for optimal collaboration and accessibility! |
| 🏆 March 2025 | IJCAI 2025 Acceptance! 🎊 🎉 Our survey has been officially accepted by the prestigious IJCAI 2025 Survey Track! This is a major milestone for our research. |
Stay tuned for more exciting developments! 🔔
Your comprehensive gateway to cutting-edge research in AI-powered computational pathology
Welcome to our systematic compilation of research works in computational pathology! This repository brings together groundbreaking publications from premier conferences and top-tier journals, creating an invaluable centralized resource for the global research community.
Perfect for: Researchers 👨🔬 | Practitioners 👩⚕️ | Students 🎓 | Anyone exploring the fascinating intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Pathology
🚀 Ready to dive into the future of computational pathology? Explore our carefully curated collection and accelerate your research journey!
A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions
IJCAI 2025 Survey Track
Abstract: Computational pathology, which involves analyzing whole slide images for automated cancer diagnosis, relies on multiple instance learning, where performance depends heavily on the feature extractor and aggregator. Recent Pathology Foundation Models (PFMs), pretrained on large-scale histopathology data, have significantly enhanced both the extractor and aggregator, but they lack a systematic analysis framework. In this survey, we present a hierarchical taxonomy organizing PFMs through a top-down philosophy applicable to foundation model analysis in any domain: model scope, model pretraining, and model design. Additionally, we systematically categorize PFM evaluation tasks into slide-level, patch-level, multimodal, and biological tasks, providing comprehensive benchmarking criteria. Our analysis identifies critical challenges in both PFM development (pathology-specific methodology, end-to-end pretraining, data-model scalability) and utilization (effective adaptation, model maintenance), paving the way for future directions in this promising field.
Figure 1: Schematic representation of our hierarchical taxonomy integrated within the MIL framework for PFMs.
If you find our paper useful, please consider citing our paper in your work:
@inproceedings{ijcai2025p1193,
title={A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions},
author={Xiong, Conghao and Chen, Hao and Sung, Joseph J. Y.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25},
pages={10751--10760},
year={2025},
month={8},
note={Survey Track},
doi={10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193},
url={https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193}
}
Update policy: This website is a living companion to the IJCAI 2025 survey. The IJCAI paper is the fixed camera-ready record; the website and JSON tables are maintained as live resources with updated venues, links, metadata, and curated table refinements.
The following table presents comprehensive technical specifications for Our Surveyed PFMs according to our hierarchical taxonomy dimensions: Model Scope, Model Pretraining, and Model Design. This hierarchical taxonomy encompasses:
Input Modalities: H&E (H), Patch (P), Text (T), WSIs with unspecified stains (W), IHC (I), Genomics (G), DNA (D), RNA (R).
Scale Categories: XS, S, B, L, H, g, G (Extra-Small to Giant) based on parameter count
🔍 Essential for developers to understand PFM architectures, computational requirements, and implementation specifications for deployment in clinical and research environments.
| Model Scope | Model Pretraining | Model Design | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Extractor | Aggregator | Input | Base Method | Mag/Res | Architecture | # Params. | Scale |
| CTransPath | ✅ | ❌ | H | MoCov3 | 10/224 | Swin-T/14 | 28.3M | S |
| REMEDIS | ✅ | ❌ | H | SimCLR | Multi/224 | ResNet-50 | 25.6M | S |
| HIPT | ✅ | ✅ | H | DINO | 20/256,4096 | ViT-S/16-XS/256 | 21.7/2.78M | S/XS |
| PLIP | ✅ | ❌ | P, T | CLIP | 20/224 | ViT-B/32 | 87M | B |
| CONCH | ✅ | ❌ | W, T | iBOT/CoCa | 20/256 | ViT-B/16 | 86.3M | B |
| Phikon | ✅ | ❌ | H | iBOT | 20/224 | ViT-S/B/L/16 | 21.7/85.8/307M | S/B/L |
| UNI | ✅ | ❌ | H | DINOv2 | 20/256,512 | ViT-L/16 | 307M | L |
| Virchow | ✅ | ❌ | H | DINOv2 | 20/224 | ViT-H/14 | 632M | H |
| SINAI | ✅ | ❌ | H | DINO/MAE | Unknown | ViT-S/L | 21.7M/303.3M | S/L |
| CHIEF | ❌ | ✅ | H, T | Sup.+CLIP | 10/224 | CHIEF | 1.2M | XS |
| Prov-GigaPath | ✅ | ✅ | H, I | DINOv2/MAE | 20/256 | ViT-g/14/LongNet | 1.13B/85.1M | g/B |
| Pathoduet | ✅ | ❌ | H, I | MoCov3 | 40/256,20/1024 | ViT-B/16 | 85.8M | B |
| RudolfV | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | 20,40,80/256 | ViT-L/14 | 304M | L |
| PLUTO | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2+MAE+Fourier | 20,40/224 | FlexiViT-S/16 | 22M | S |
| PRISM | ❌ | ✅ | H, T | CoCa | 20/224 | Perceiver | 45.0M | S |
| TANGLE | ✅ | ✅ | H, G | iBOT/SimCLR | 20/224 | ViT-B/16/ABMIL | 86.3/2.3M | B/XS |
| MUSK | ✅ | ❌ | H, T | MIM | 10,20,40/384 | BEiT-3 | 675M | H |
| BEPH | ✅ | ❌ | H | MIM | 40/224 | BEiTv2 | 192.55M | B |
| Hibou | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | Unknown | ViT-B/14, ViT-L/14 | 86.3/307M | B/L |
| mSTAR+ | ✅ | ✅ | H, G, T | CLIP/ST | 20/256 | TransMIL+/ViT-L | 2.67/307M | XS/L |
| GPFM | ✅ | ❌ | H | UKD | 40/512 | ViT-L/14 | 307M | L |
| Virchow2G | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | 5,10,20,40/224 | ViT-G/14 | 1.9B | G |
| MADELEINE | ❌ | ✅ | W | CLIP | 10,20/256 | MH-ABMIL | 5.0M | XS |
| Phikon-v2 | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | 20/224 | ViT-L/16 | 307M | L |
| TITAN | ❌ | ✅ | W, T | iBOT/CoCa | 20/8192 | TITAN/TITAN-V | 48.5/42.1M | S |
| KEEP | ✅ | ❌ | W, T | KEVL/CLIP-style VLP | 20/224 | UNI | 307M | L |
| THREADS | ❌ | ✅ | H, D, R | CLIP | 20/512 | MH-ABMIL | 11.3M | XS |
The following comprehensive table presents the surveyed PFMs with detailed technical specifications aligned with our hierarchical taxonomy. This systematic compilation encompasses models from premier venues spanning the latest advances in computational pathology:
Technical Details: Publication venue, pretraining methodology, model architecture, data sources, dataset statistics, and direct access links to implementations and pre-trained models.
🚀 Essential reference for researchers to explore PFM specifications, access implementations, and compare training scales across the computational pathology landscape.
| Venue | Model | Method | Architecture | Data Source | Data Statistics | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MedIA | CTransPath | SRCL | Swin-T/14 | TCGA + PAIP | 32,220 WSIs 15,580,262 Patches | GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Biomed. Eng. | REMEDIS | SimCLR | ResNet-50 | TCGA | 29,018 WSIs 50 Million Patches | |
| CVPR | HIPT | DINO | ViT-S/16 ViT-XS/256 | TCGA | 10,678 H&E WSIs ~ 104 Million Patches | GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | PLIP | CLIP | ViT-B/32 | OpenPath | 208,414 Image-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | CONCH | P: iBOT A: CoCa | P: ViT-B/16 A: GPT-style | In-house | 21,442 WSIs 16 Million Patches > 1.17M Image-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| medRxiv | Phikon | iBOT | ViT-S/B/L/16 | TCGA | 6,093 WSIs 43,374,634 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | UNI | DINOv2 | ViT-L/16 | Mass-100K | 100,426 H&E WSIs 100,130,900 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | Virchow | DINOv2 | ViT-H/14 | MSKCC | 1,488,550 H&E WSIs 2 Billion Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| AAAI S. | SINAI | DINO MAE | ViT-S ViT-L | Mount Sinai Health System | 423,563 H&E WSIs 3.2 Billion Patches | GitHub PDF |
| Nature | CHIEF | P: Pretrained S: Sup.+CLIP | P: CTransPath S: CHIEF | Public + In-house | 60,530 H&E WSIs ~ 15 Million Patches | Docker GitHub PDF |
| Nature | Prov-GigaPath | P: DINOv2 S: MAE A: CLIP | P: ViT-g/14 S: LongNet | Providence Health System | 171,189 WSIs 1,384,860,229 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| MedIA | Pathoduet | Enhanced MoCov3 | ViT-B/16 | TCGA | 11,000 WSIs 13,166,437 Patches | GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | RudolfV | DINOv2 | ViT-L/14 | TCGA + In-house | 133,998 WSIs 1.25 Billion Patches | |
| ICML W. | PLUTO | DINOv2+ MAE+Fourier | FlexiViT-S/16 | TCGA + Proprietary | 158,852 WSIs 195 Million Patches | |
| arXiv | PRISM | P: Pretrained S: CoCa | P: Virchow S: Perceiver | MSKCC | 587,196 WSIs 195K Pathology Reports | HuggingFace PDF |
| CVPR | TANGLE | P: iBOT S: Alignment | P: ViT-B/16 S: ABMIL | TG-GATEs TCGA-BRCA TCGA-NSCLC | Visual pretraining: 47,227 WSIs 15M Patches S+E RNA pairs: 6,597 liver 1,020 breast 1,012 lung | GitHub PDF |
| Nature | MUSK | UMP | BEiT-3 | Quilt-1M + PathAsst | ~33,000 H&E WSIs 50M Patches 1M Image-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Commun. | BEPH | MIM | BEiTv2 | TCGA | 11,760 WSIs 11,774,353 Patches | GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | Hibou | DINOv2 | ViT-L/14 ViT-B/14 | Proprietary | 936,441 H&E WSIs 202,464 non-H&E WSIs ViT-L: 1.2B Patches ViT-B: 512M Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Commun. | mSTAR+ | S: CLIP P: mSTAR | S: TransMIL+ (pretrained aggregator) P: ViT-L | TCGA | 11,727 WSIs 22,127 Pretraining Modality Pairs 26,169 Curated Modality Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Biomed. Eng. | GPFM | UKD | ViT-L/14 | 33 Public Dataset | 72,280 WSIs 190,212,668 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | Virchow2 Virchow2G | Enhanced DINOv2 | ViT-H/14 ViT-G/14 | MSKCC + Worldwide | 3,134,922 WSIs with Diverse Stains | HuggingFace PDF |
| ECCV | MADELEINE | P: Pretrained S: CLIP + GOT | P: CONCH S:MH-ABMIL | Acrobat + BWH | 16,281 WSIs with Diverse Stains | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | Phikon-v2 | DINOv2 | ViT-L/16 | Public + In-house | 58,359 WSIs 456,060,584 Patches | HuggingFace PDF |
| Nat. Med. | TITAN | P: Pretrained Stage1: iBOT Stage2: CoCa | P: CONCHv1.5 S: ViT-T/14 | Mass-340K | 335,645 WSIs 423,122 Image-Text Pairs 182,862 WSI-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Cancer Cell | KEEP | KEVL | UNI | Quilt-1M + OpenPath | 143K KG-structured Image-Text Semantic Groups Hierarchical Medical KG | HuggingFace GitHub DOI |
| arXiv | THREADS | P: Pretrained S: CLIP | P: CONCHv1.5 S: MH-ABMIL | MBTG-47K: MGH+BWH +TCGA +GTEx | 47,171 H&E WSIs 125,148,770 Patches 26,615 Bulk RNA 20,556 DNA Variants | Benchmark/Data Benchmark Code Paper |
The following comparison table systematically evaluates the PFMs across 13 distinct evaluation tasks within our comprehensive evaluation benchmark. The analysis spans four critical capability domains aligned with the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) paradigm:
Evaluation Paradigms: Zero-shot (Z), Few-shot (F), Complete Training (C), Not Available (❌)
💡 Critical for practitioners seeking to identify optimal PFMs for specific tasks, from basic WSI classification to advanced multimodal AI tasks.
| Model | Slide Level | Patch Level | Multimodal | Biological | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cls. | Surv. | Retri. | Seg. | Cls. | P2P | Seg. | I2T | T2I | RG | VQA | GA | MP | |
| CTransPath | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | F/C | Z | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| REMEDIS | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| HIPT | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| PLIP | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | ❌ | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| CONCH | Z/F/C | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z/F | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Phikon | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| UNI | F/C | ❌ | F | ❌ | F/C | Z | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Virchow | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ |
| SINAI | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| CHIEF | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| Prov-GigaPath | Z/C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Z/C | ❌ |
| Pathoduet | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C |
| RudolfV | ❌ | ❌ | Z | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| PLUTO | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C |
| PRISM | Z/C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | F/C | ❌ |
| TANGLE | F | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| MUSK | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | Z/F/C | Z | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | C | C | C |
| BEPH | Z/F/C | C | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Hibou | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ |
| mSTAR+ | Z/F/C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | C |
| GPFM | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | C | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C | C | ❌ |
| Virchow2 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| MADELEINE | F | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C |
| Phikon-v2 | F/C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C | F/C |
| TITAN | Z/F/C | C | Z | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | C | ❌ | C | C |
| KEEP | Z | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| THREADS | F/C | C | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | F/C |
Paper tags: task describes the final problem/output; topic describes the main technical route.
Task tags: classification WSI/patch/tile classification; survival prognosis/risk prediction; segmentation segmentation or localization; generation synthesis or augmentation; molecular gene/RNA/DNA/spatial transcriptomics/pathway prediction or generation; language VQA/caption/report/dialogue outputs; compression WSI compression; benchmark dataset or benchmark contribution.
Topic tags: mil MIL or slide-level aggregation; foundation_model pathology foundation model pretraining/adaptation/evaluation; vision_language image-text/report/language-prompt/VLM/LLM reasoning; generative_model diffusion, flow, VAE, or related generative modeling; multi_omics histology with gene/RNA/DNA/genomic/spatial transcriptomic/pathway data, not report text alone; efficient_wsi sampling, compression, scalable training/inference, or other WSI efficiency methods.
classification; topic: milclassification; topic: foundation_model, milclassification; topic: milsurvival, classification, molecular; topic: multi_omicsmolecular; topic: multi_omicsmolecular; topic: multi_omicssurvival; topic: multi_omicsclassification, survival; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagesegmentation, language, benchmark; topic: vision_languageclassification, segmentation, language; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagegeneration; topic: generative_modelmolecular; topic: multi_omicssegmentation; topic: efficient_wsiclassification; topic: generative_modelmolecular; topic: multi_omicssegmentationsegmentation, classificationmolecular; topic: multi_omicsclassification, survival; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: mil, vision_languagesurvival; topic: multi_omics, generative_modelsegmentationclassification, language; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagelanguage; topic: vision_languageclassification; topic: foundation_model, efficient_wsilanguage, benchmark; topic: foundation_model, vision_language, efficient_wsiclassification, molecular; topic: foundation_model, mil, efficient_wsiclassification, survival; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: foundation_model, vision_language, milsurvival, segmentation; topic: efficient_wsimolecular; topic: multi_omicsgeneration, molecular; topic: multi_omics, generative_modelgeneration; topic: generative_model, efficient_wsiclassification, generation; topic: generative_modelgeneration, segmentation; topic: generative_modelsegmentationbenchmark; topic: foundation_modelclassification, segmentation, benchmark; topic: foundation_modelsurvival; topic: milclassification, segmentation; topic: milclassification, survival; topic: milclassification; topic: mil, generative_modelclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification, survival; topic: efficient_wsilanguage, benchmark; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagesurvival; topic: vision_language, multi_omicsgeneration; topic: mil, generative_model, efficient_wsiclassification, survival; topic: foundation_modelgeneration, molecular; topic: multi_omics, generative_model, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsisegmentation; topic: generative_modelclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: foundation_model, vision_language, efficient_wsisurvival; topic: vision_language, multi_omicsclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsilanguage, benchmark; topic: foundation_model, vision_languageclassification, survival; topic: efficient_wsiclassification, language; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagemolecular; topic: multi_omicsclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: milcompression; topic: efficient_wsiclassification; topic: generative_modelsurvival; topic: milclassification; topic: foundation_modelsurvival; topic: multi_omics, generative_modelclassification; topic: milclassification, survival; topic: foundation_model, vision_languageIf you find this repository useful, please cite our work:
@inproceedings{ijcai2025p1193,
title={A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions},
author={Xiong, Conghao and Chen, Hao and Sung, Joseph J. Y.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25},
pages={10751--10760},
year={2025},
month={8},
note={Survey Track},
doi={10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193},
url={https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193}
}
A Comprehensive Collection of Whole Slide Image Analysis and Pathology Foundation Models
🌐 Website • 📖 Our Survey • 📚 Curated Papers • 🔧 Toolboxes • 📊 Datasets • 🏆 Benchmarks
Interactive survey companion for pathology foundation models, evaluation tasks, curated papers, toolboxes, datasets, and benchmarks.
| 📅 Timeline | 🎉 What's New |
|---|---|
| 🔔 May 2026 | Interactive Website Added! 🌐 A static website is now included for browsing the survey companion, foundation model explorer, evaluation matrix, curated papers, toolboxes, datasets, and benchmarks. Open it here: 🌐 Awesome WSI Website. |
| 🔔 May 2026 | Structured Data, Resources, and Official Links Updated! 📄 The survey citation now links to the official IJCAI proceedings page, PDF, and DOI. The Toolboxes, Datasets, and Benchmarks sections have been expanded with verified resources and migrated to structured JSON, together with the core tables and curated papers, so the README can be rendered consistently from data sources. Conference placeholders for upcoming curated paper sections have also been prepared. |
| 🔔 Oct 2025 | Toolboxes, Datasets, Benchmarks Online! 📑 The rest of the planned contents are online, available in 🔧 Useful Toolboxes, 📊 Datasets, and 🏆 Benchmarks! Check them out as we will update them regularly! |
| 🔔 July 2025 | Curated Papers Online! 📑 The curated paper section is online, and available in 📚 Curated Papers. More papers are coming and check it out! |
| 🌟 June 2025 | Survey Materials Organized! 📑 All materials related to our comprehensive survey have been carefully organized and are now available in 📑 Our Survey. More exciting updates coming your way soon! |
| 🚀 June 2025 | Repository Structure Finalized! 🎯 We've established the perfect organizational structure for this repository. Everything is now in its right place for optimal collaboration and accessibility! |
| 🏆 March 2025 | IJCAI 2025 Acceptance! 🎊 🎉 Our survey has been officially accepted by the prestigious IJCAI 2025 Survey Track! This is a major milestone for our research. |
Stay tuned for more exciting developments! 🔔
Your comprehensive gateway to cutting-edge research in AI-powered computational pathology
Welcome to our systematic compilation of research works in computational pathology! This repository brings together groundbreaking publications from premier conferences and top-tier journals, creating an invaluable centralized resource for the global research community.
Perfect for: Researchers 👨🔬 | Practitioners 👩⚕️ | Students 🎓 | Anyone exploring the fascinating intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Pathology
🚀 Ready to dive into the future of computational pathology? Explore our carefully curated collection and accelerate your research journey!
A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions
IJCAI 2025 Survey Track
Abstract: Computational pathology, which involves analyzing whole slide images for automated cancer diagnosis, relies on multiple instance learning, where performance depends heavily on the feature extractor and aggregator. Recent Pathology Foundation Models (PFMs), pretrained on large-scale histopathology data, have significantly enhanced both the extractor and aggregator, but they lack a systematic analysis framework. In this survey, we present a hierarchical taxonomy organizing PFMs through a top-down philosophy applicable to foundation model analysis in any domain: model scope, model pretraining, and model design. Additionally, we systematically categorize PFM evaluation tasks into slide-level, patch-level, multimodal, and biological tasks, providing comprehensive benchmarking criteria. Our analysis identifies critical challenges in both PFM development (pathology-specific methodology, end-to-end pretraining, data-model scalability) and utilization (effective adaptation, model maintenance), paving the way for future directions in this promising field.
Figure 1: Schematic representation of our hierarchical taxonomy integrated within the MIL framework for PFMs.
If you find our paper useful, please consider citing our paper in your work:
@inproceedings{ijcai2025p1193,
title={A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions},
author={Xiong, Conghao and Chen, Hao and Sung, Joseph J. Y.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25},
pages={10751--10760},
year={2025},
month={8},
note={Survey Track},
doi={10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193},
url={https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193}
}
Update policy: This website is a living companion to the IJCAI 2025 survey. The IJCAI paper is the fixed camera-ready record; the website and JSON tables are maintained as live resources with updated venues, links, metadata, and curated table refinements.
The following table presents comprehensive technical specifications for Our Surveyed PFMs according to our hierarchical taxonomy dimensions: Model Scope, Model Pretraining, and Model Design. This hierarchical taxonomy encompasses:
Input Modalities: H&E (H), Patch (P), Text (T), WSIs with unspecified stains (W), IHC (I), Genomics (G), DNA (D), RNA (R).
Scale Categories: XS, S, B, L, H, g, G (Extra-Small to Giant) based on parameter count
🔍 Essential for developers to understand PFM architectures, computational requirements, and implementation specifications for deployment in clinical and research environments.
| Model Scope | Model Pretraining | Model Design | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Extractor | Aggregator | Input | Base Method | Mag/Res | Architecture | # Params. | Scale |
| CTransPath | ✅ | ❌ | H | MoCov3 | 10/224 | Swin-T/14 | 28.3M | S |
| REMEDIS | ✅ | ❌ | H | SimCLR | Multi/224 | ResNet-50 | 25.6M | S |
| HIPT | ✅ | ✅ | H | DINO | 20/256,4096 | ViT-S/16-XS/256 | 21.7/2.78M | S/XS |
| PLIP | ✅ | ❌ | P, T | CLIP | 20/224 | ViT-B/32 | 87M | B |
| CONCH | ✅ | ❌ | W, T | iBOT/CoCa | 20/256 | ViT-B/16 | 86.3M | B |
| Phikon | ✅ | ❌ | H | iBOT | 20/224 | ViT-S/B/L/16 | 21.7/85.8/307M | S/B/L |
| UNI | ✅ | ❌ | H | DINOv2 | 20/256,512 | ViT-L/16 | 307M | L |
| Virchow | ✅ | ❌ | H | DINOv2 | 20/224 | ViT-H/14 | 632M | H |
| SINAI | ✅ | ❌ | H | DINO/MAE | Unknown | ViT-S/L | 21.7M/303.3M | S/L |
| CHIEF | ❌ | ✅ | H, T | Sup.+CLIP | 10/224 | CHIEF | 1.2M | XS |
| Prov-GigaPath | ✅ | ✅ | H, I | DINOv2/MAE | 20/256 | ViT-g/14/LongNet | 1.13B/85.1M | g/B |
| Pathoduet | ✅ | ❌ | H, I | MoCov3 | 40/256,20/1024 | ViT-B/16 | 85.8M | B |
| RudolfV | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | 20,40,80/256 | ViT-L/14 | 304M | L |
| PLUTO | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2+MAE+Fourier | 20,40/224 | FlexiViT-S/16 | 22M | S |
| PRISM | ❌ | ✅ | H, T | CoCa | 20/224 | Perceiver | 45.0M | S |
| TANGLE | ✅ | ✅ | H, G | iBOT/SimCLR | 20/224 | ViT-B/16/ABMIL | 86.3/2.3M | B/XS |
| MUSK | ✅ | ❌ | H, T | MIM | 10,20,40/384 | BEiT-3 | 675M | H |
| BEPH | ✅ | ❌ | H | MIM | 40/224 | BEiTv2 | 192.55M | B |
| Hibou | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | Unknown | ViT-B/14, ViT-L/14 | 86.3/307M | B/L |
| mSTAR+ | ✅ | ✅ | H, G, T | CLIP/ST | 20/256 | TransMIL+/ViT-L | 2.67/307M | XS/L |
| GPFM | ✅ | ❌ | H | UKD | 40/512 | ViT-L/14 | 307M | L |
| Virchow2G | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | 5,10,20,40/224 | ViT-G/14 | 1.9B | G |
| MADELEINE | ❌ | ✅ | W | CLIP | 10,20/256 | MH-ABMIL | 5.0M | XS |
| Phikon-v2 | ✅ | ❌ | W | DINOv2 | 20/224 | ViT-L/16 | 307M | L |
| TITAN | ❌ | ✅ | W, T | iBOT/CoCa | 20/8192 | TITAN/TITAN-V | 48.5/42.1M | S |
| KEEP | ✅ | ❌ | W, T | KEVL/CLIP-style VLP | 20/224 | UNI | 307M | L |
| THREADS | ❌ | ✅ | H, D, R | CLIP | 20/512 | MH-ABMIL | 11.3M | XS |
The following comprehensive table presents the surveyed PFMs with detailed technical specifications aligned with our hierarchical taxonomy. This systematic compilation encompasses models from premier venues spanning the latest advances in computational pathology:
Technical Details: Publication venue, pretraining methodology, model architecture, data sources, dataset statistics, and direct access links to implementations and pre-trained models.
🚀 Essential reference for researchers to explore PFM specifications, access implementations, and compare training scales across the computational pathology landscape.
| Venue | Model | Method | Architecture | Data Source | Data Statistics | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MedIA | CTransPath | SRCL | Swin-T/14 | TCGA + PAIP | 32,220 WSIs 15,580,262 Patches | GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Biomed. Eng. | REMEDIS | SimCLR | ResNet-50 | TCGA | 29,018 WSIs 50 Million Patches | |
| CVPR | HIPT | DINO | ViT-S/16 ViT-XS/256 | TCGA | 10,678 H&E WSIs ~ 104 Million Patches | GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | PLIP | CLIP | ViT-B/32 | OpenPath | 208,414 Image-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | CONCH | P: iBOT A: CoCa | P: ViT-B/16 A: GPT-style | In-house | 21,442 WSIs 16 Million Patches > 1.17M Image-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| medRxiv | Phikon | iBOT | ViT-S/B/L/16 | TCGA | 6,093 WSIs 43,374,634 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | UNI | DINOv2 | ViT-L/16 | Mass-100K | 100,426 H&E WSIs 100,130,900 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Med. | Virchow | DINOv2 | ViT-H/14 | MSKCC | 1,488,550 H&E WSIs 2 Billion Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| AAAI S. | SINAI | DINO MAE | ViT-S ViT-L | Mount Sinai Health System | 423,563 H&E WSIs 3.2 Billion Patches | GitHub PDF |
| Nature | CHIEF | P: Pretrained S: Sup.+CLIP | P: CTransPath S: CHIEF | Public + In-house | 60,530 H&E WSIs ~ 15 Million Patches | Docker GitHub PDF |
| Nature | Prov-GigaPath | P: DINOv2 S: MAE A: CLIP | P: ViT-g/14 S: LongNet | Providence Health System | 171,189 WSIs 1,384,860,229 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| MedIA | Pathoduet | Enhanced MoCov3 | ViT-B/16 | TCGA | 11,000 WSIs 13,166,437 Patches | GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | RudolfV | DINOv2 | ViT-L/14 | TCGA + In-house | 133,998 WSIs 1.25 Billion Patches | |
| ICML W. | PLUTO | DINOv2+ MAE+Fourier | FlexiViT-S/16 | TCGA + Proprietary | 158,852 WSIs 195 Million Patches | |
| arXiv | PRISM | P: Pretrained S: CoCa | P: Virchow S: Perceiver | MSKCC | 587,196 WSIs 195K Pathology Reports | HuggingFace PDF |
| CVPR | TANGLE | P: iBOT S: Alignment | P: ViT-B/16 S: ABMIL | TG-GATEs TCGA-BRCA TCGA-NSCLC | Visual pretraining: 47,227 WSIs 15M Patches S+E RNA pairs: 6,597 liver 1,020 breast 1,012 lung | GitHub PDF |
| Nature | MUSK | UMP | BEiT-3 | Quilt-1M + PathAsst | ~33,000 H&E WSIs 50M Patches 1M Image-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Commun. | BEPH | MIM | BEiTv2 | TCGA | 11,760 WSIs 11,774,353 Patches | GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | Hibou | DINOv2 | ViT-L/14 ViT-B/14 | Proprietary | 936,441 H&E WSIs 202,464 non-H&E WSIs ViT-L: 1.2B Patches ViT-B: 512M Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Commun. | mSTAR+ | S: CLIP P: mSTAR | S: TransMIL+ (pretrained aggregator) P: ViT-L | TCGA | 11,727 WSIs 22,127 Pretraining Modality Pairs 26,169 Curated Modality Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Nat. Biomed. Eng. | GPFM | UKD | ViT-L/14 | 33 Public Dataset | 72,280 WSIs 190,212,668 Patches | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | Virchow2 Virchow2G | Enhanced DINOv2 | ViT-H/14 ViT-G/14 | MSKCC + Worldwide | 3,134,922 WSIs with Diverse Stains | HuggingFace PDF |
| ECCV | MADELEINE | P: Pretrained S: CLIP + GOT | P: CONCH S:MH-ABMIL | Acrobat + BWH | 16,281 WSIs with Diverse Stains | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| arXiv | Phikon-v2 | DINOv2 | ViT-L/16 | Public + In-house | 58,359 WSIs 456,060,584 Patches | HuggingFace PDF |
| Nat. Med. | TITAN | P: Pretrained Stage1: iBOT Stage2: CoCa | P: CONCHv1.5 S: ViT-T/14 | Mass-340K | 335,645 WSIs 423,122 Image-Text Pairs 182,862 WSI-Text Pairs | HuggingFace GitHub PDF |
| Cancer Cell | KEEP | KEVL | UNI | Quilt-1M + OpenPath | 143K KG-structured Image-Text Semantic Groups Hierarchical Medical KG | HuggingFace GitHub DOI |
| arXiv | THREADS | P: Pretrained S: CLIP | P: CONCHv1.5 S: MH-ABMIL | MBTG-47K: MGH+BWH +TCGA +GTEx | 47,171 H&E WSIs 125,148,770 Patches 26,615 Bulk RNA 20,556 DNA Variants | Benchmark/Data Benchmark Code Paper |
The following comparison table systematically evaluates the PFMs across 13 distinct evaluation tasks within our comprehensive evaluation benchmark. The analysis spans four critical capability domains aligned with the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) paradigm:
Evaluation Paradigms: Zero-shot (Z), Few-shot (F), Complete Training (C), Not Available (❌)
💡 Critical for practitioners seeking to identify optimal PFMs for specific tasks, from basic WSI classification to advanced multimodal AI tasks.
| Model | Slide Level | Patch Level | Multimodal | Biological | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cls. | Surv. | Retri. | Seg. | Cls. | P2P | Seg. | I2T | T2I | RG | VQA | GA | MP | |
| CTransPath | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | F/C | Z | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| REMEDIS | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| HIPT | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| PLIP | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | ❌ | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| CONCH | Z/F/C | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z/F | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Phikon | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| UNI | F/C | ❌ | F | ❌ | F/C | Z | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Virchow | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ |
| SINAI | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| CHIEF | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| Prov-GigaPath | Z/C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Z/C | ❌ |
| Pathoduet | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C |
| RudolfV | ❌ | ❌ | Z | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C |
| PLUTO | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C |
| PRISM | Z/C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | F/C | ❌ |
| TANGLE | F | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| MUSK | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | Z/F/C | Z | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | C | C | C |
| BEPH | Z/F/C | C | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Hibou | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ |
| mSTAR+ | Z/F/C | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | C | C |
| GPFM | C | C | ❌ | ❌ | C | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | C | C | ❌ |
| Virchow2 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| MADELEINE | F | C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C |
| Phikon-v2 | F/C | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | F/C | F/C |
| TITAN | Z/F/C | C | Z | ❌ | C | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | C | ❌ | C | C |
| KEEP | Z | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | ❌ | Z | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| THREADS | F/C | C | Z | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | C | F/C |
Paper tags: task describes the final problem/output; topic describes the main technical route.
Task tags: classification WSI/patch/tile classification; survival prognosis/risk prediction; segmentation segmentation or localization; generation synthesis or augmentation; molecular gene/RNA/DNA/spatial transcriptomics/pathway prediction or generation; language VQA/caption/report/dialogue outputs; compression WSI compression; benchmark dataset or benchmark contribution.
Topic tags: mil MIL or slide-level aggregation; foundation_model pathology foundation model pretraining/adaptation/evaluation; vision_language image-text/report/language-prompt/VLM/LLM reasoning; generative_model diffusion, flow, VAE, or related generative modeling; multi_omics histology with gene/RNA/DNA/genomic/spatial transcriptomic/pathway data, not report text alone; efficient_wsi sampling, compression, scalable training/inference, or other WSI efficiency methods.
classification; topic: milclassification; topic: foundation_model, milclassification; topic: milsurvival, classification, molecular; topic: multi_omicsmolecular; topic: multi_omicsmolecular; topic: multi_omicssurvival; topic: multi_omicsclassification, survival; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagesegmentation, language, benchmark; topic: vision_languageclassification, segmentation, language; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagegeneration; topic: generative_modelmolecular; topic: multi_omicssegmentation; topic: efficient_wsiclassification; topic: generative_modelmolecular; topic: multi_omicssegmentationsegmentation, classificationmolecular; topic: multi_omicsclassification, survival; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: mil, vision_languagesurvival; topic: multi_omics, generative_modelsegmentationclassification, language; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagelanguage; topic: vision_languageclassification; topic: foundation_model, efficient_wsilanguage, benchmark; topic: foundation_model, vision_language, efficient_wsiclassification, molecular; topic: foundation_model, mil, efficient_wsiclassification, survival; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: foundation_model, vision_language, milsurvival, segmentation; topic: efficient_wsimolecular; topic: multi_omicsgeneration, molecular; topic: multi_omics, generative_modelgeneration; topic: generative_model, efficient_wsiclassification, generation; topic: generative_modelgeneration, segmentation; topic: generative_modelsegmentationbenchmark; topic: foundation_modelclassification, segmentation, benchmark; topic: foundation_modelsurvival; topic: milclassification, segmentation; topic: milclassification, survival; topic: milclassification; topic: mil, generative_modelclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification, survival; topic: efficient_wsilanguage, benchmark; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagesurvival; topic: vision_language, multi_omicsgeneration; topic: mil, generative_model, efficient_wsiclassification, survival; topic: foundation_modelgeneration, molecular; topic: multi_omics, generative_model, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsisegmentation; topic: generative_modelclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: foundation_model, vision_language, efficient_wsisurvival; topic: vision_language, multi_omicsclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsilanguage, benchmark; topic: foundation_model, vision_languageclassification, survival; topic: efficient_wsiclassification, language; topic: foundation_model, vision_languagemolecular; topic: multi_omicsclassification; topic: milclassification; topic: mil, efficient_wsiclassification; topic: milcompression; topic: efficient_wsiclassification; topic: generative_modelsurvival; topic: milclassification; topic: foundation_modelsurvival; topic: multi_omics, generative_modelclassification; topic: milclassification, survival; topic: foundation_model, vision_languageIf you find this repository useful, please cite our work:
@inproceedings{ijcai2025p1193,
title={A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions},
author={Xiong, Conghao and Chen, Hao and Sung, Joseph J. Y.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25},
pages={10751--10760},
year={2025},
month={8},
note={Survey Track},
doi={10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193},
url={https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1193}
}