Computational pathology uses artificial intelligence to enable precision medicine and decision support systems through the analysis of whole slide images. It has the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. However, a major challenge to this objective is that for many specific computational pathology tasks the amount of data is inadequate for development. To address this challenge, we created Virchow, a 632 million parameter deep neural network foundation model for computational pathology. Using self-supervised learning, Virchow is trained on 1.5 million hematoxylin and eosin stained whole slide images from diverse tissue groups, which is orders of magnitude more data than previous works. When evaluated on downstream tasks including tile-level pan-cancer detection and subtyping and slide-level biomarker prediction, Virchow outperforms state-of-the-art systems both on internal datasets drawn from the same population as the pretraining data as well as external public datasets. Virchow achieves 93% balanced accuracy for pancancer tile classification, and AUCs of 0.983 for colon microsatellite instability status prediction and 0.967 for breast CDH1 status prediction. The gains in performance highlight the importance of pretraining on massive pathology image datasets, suggesting pretraining on even larger datasets could continue improving performance for many high-impact applications where limited amounts of training data are available, such as drug outcome prediction.

使用自监督学习方法，创建了Virchow计算病理学的632百万参数深度神经网络基础模型，以解决病理学任务中缺乏数据的挑战，并在病理图像分类、癌症检测和亚型、生物标志物预测等多个任务中表现出色，显示了预训练在病理学图像数据集上的重要性和潜力。

Virchow：百万切片数字病理基础模型