PLUTO: Pathology-Universal Transformer

Understand

Pathology is the study of microscopic inspection of tissue, and a pathology diagnosis is often the medical gold standard to diagnose disease.

• Pathology images provide a unique challenge for computer-vision-based analysis: a single pathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) is gigapixel-sized and often contains hundreds of thousands to millions of objects of interest across multiple resolutions.
• In this work, we propose PathoLogy Universal TransfOrmer (PLUTO): a light-weight pathology FM that is pre-trained on a diverse dataset of 195 million image tiles collected from multiple sites and extracts meaningful representations across multiple WSI scales that enable a large variety of downstream pathology tasks.
• In particular, we design task-specific adaptation heads that utilize PLUTO's output embeddings for tasks which span pathology scales ranging from subcellular to slide-scale, including instance segmentation, tile classification, and slide-level prediction.