To handle the large scale of whole slide images in computational pathology, most approaches first tessellate the images into smaller patches, extract features from these patches, and finally aggregate the feature vectors with weakly-supervised learning. The performance of this workflow strongly depends on the quality of the extracted features. Recently, foundation models in computer vision showed that leveraging huge amounts of data through supervised or self-supervised learning improves feature quality and generalizability for a variety of tasks. In this study, we benchmark the most popular vision foundation models as feature extractors for histopathology data. We evaluate the models in two settings: slide-level classification and patch-level classification. We show that foundation models are a strong baseline. Our experiments demonstrate that by finetuning a foundation model on a single GPU for only two hours or three days depending on the dataset, we can match or outperform state-of-the-art feature extractors for computational pathology. These findings imply that even with little resources one can finetune a feature extractor tailored towards a specific downstream task and dataset. This is a considerable shift from the current state, where only few institutions with large amounts of resources and datasets are able to train a feature extractor. We publish all code used for training and evaluation as well as the finetuned models.

通过细化基础模型，仅经历两小时或三天的单个GPU训练，我们可以在计算病理学中的特征提取上相媲美或超越现有的方法，这表示即使资源有限，也可以针对特定下游任务和数据集训练一个定制的特征提取器。

基础模型的低资源化微调在组织病理学中超越了现有技术水平