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Thomas Fuchs: Virchow Foundation Model capable of characterizing the morphology of cancer at unprecedented acuity

Photo taken from Thomas Fuchs/LinkedIn

Jul 28, 2024, 13:53

Thomas Fuchs: Virchow Foundation Model capable of characterizing the morphology of cancer at unprecedented acuity

Thomas Fuchs, Department Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health in Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent paper by Eugene Vorontsov et al., commenting:

“I am tremendously excited that our Nature Medicine article on Virchow is out now. This is by far the largest Computational Pathology effort to date.
Virchow is a foundation model based on billions of images from 1.5 million digital whole slides that is capable of characterizing the morphology of cancer and normal tissue at unprecedented acuity!

Virchow is the result of years of work in a collaboration between the exceptional Artificial Intelligence (AI) teams at Paige and Microsoft Research. It represents the first instantiation of a series of models that will unquestionable change the future of cancer research and patient care.

Key Highlights:

Pan-Cancer Detection: Achieves a specimen-level AUC of 0.95 across nine common and seven rare cancers.
Efficiency with Less Data: Virchow’s pan-cancer detector matches and often surpasses tissue-specific models using less training data.
Foundation Model Benefits: Enables clinical-grade predictions with limited labeled data, demonstrating the power of large-scale deep learning in pathology.

What is very dear to my heart is the fight against rare cancers. 50% of cancers are rare cancers for which we barely have biomarkers available and absolutely no AI at all. Virchow changes this! We focused explicitly on working out how this foundation model performs on rare diseases and how it will help patients left behind until today.

Read the full article in Nature Medicine.”

A foundation model for clinical-grade computational pathology and rare cancers detection published in Nature Medicine.

Authors: Eugene Vorontsov, Alican Bozkurt, Adam Casson, George Shaikovski, Michal Zelechowski, Kristen Severson, Eric Zimmermann, James Hall, Neil Tenenholtz, Nicolo Fusi, Ellen Yang, Philippe Mathieu, Alexander van Eck, Donghun Lee, Julian Viret, Eric Robert, Yi Kan Wang, Jeremy D. Kunz, Matthew C. H. Lee, Jan H. Bernhard, Ran A. Godrich, Gerard Oakley, Ewan Millar, Matthew Hanna, Hannah Wen, Juan A. Retamero, William A. Moye, Razik Yousfi, Christopher Kanan, David S. Klimstra, Brandon Rothrock, Siqi Liu and Thomas J. Fuchs.

Thomas Fuchs