CPath-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Foundation Model for Patch and Whole Slide Image Analysis in Computational Pathology

The emergence of large multimodal models (LMMs) has brought significant advancements to pathology. Previous research has primarily focused on separately training patch-level and whole-slide image (WSI)-level models, limiting the integration of learned knowledge across patches and WSIs, and resulting in redundant models. In this work, we introduce CPath-Omni, the first 15-billion-parameter LMM designed to unify both patch and WSI level image analysis, consolidating a variety of tasks at both levels, including classification, visual question answering, captioning, and visual referring prompting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPath-Omni achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across seven diverse tasks on 39 out of 42 datasets, outperforming or matching task-specific models trained for individual tasks. Additionally, we develop a specialized pathology CLIP-based visual processor for CPath-Omni, CPath-CLIP, which, for the first time, integrates different vision models and incorporates a large language model as a text encoder to build a more powerful CLIP model, which achieves SOTA performance on nine zero-shot and four few-shot datasets. Our findings highlight CPath-Omni's ability to unify diverse pathology tasks, demonstrating its potential to streamline and advance the field of foundation model in pathology.

PathGen-1.6M: 1.6 Million Pathology Image-text Pairs Generation through Multi-agent Collaboration

Vision Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have attracted substantial attention in pathology, serving as backbones for applications such as zero-shot image classification and Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis. Additionally, they can function as vision encoders when combined with large language models (LLMs) to support broader capabilities. Current efforts to train pathology VLMs rely on pathology image-text pairs from platforms like PubMed, YouTube, and Twitter, which provide limited, unscalable data with generally suboptimal image quality. In this work, we leverage large-scale WSI datasets like TCGA to extract numerous high-quality image patches. We then train a large multimodal model to generate captions for these images, creating PathGen-1.6M, a dataset containing 1.6 million high-quality image-caption pairs. Our approach involves multiple agent models collaborating to extract representative WSI patches, generating and refining captions to obtain high-quality image-text pairs. Extensive experiments show that integrating these generated pairs with existing datasets to train a pathology-specific CLIP model, PathGen-CLIP, significantly enhances its ability to analyze pathological images, with substantial improvements across nine pathology-related zero-shot image classification tasks and three whole-slide image tasks. Furthermore, we construct 200K instruction-tuning data based on PathGen-1.6M and integrate PathGen-CLIP with the Vicuna LLM to create more powerful multimodal models through instruction tuning. Overall, we provide a scalable pathway for high-quality data generation in pathology, paving the way for next-generation general pathology models.