Scaling Vision Foundation Models for Toxicologic Pathology

Abstract

Here, we present TOX-FM, a family of non-clinical PFMs trained on large-scale diverse histopathology datasets of over one million whole slide images consisting of over 60 organs across six animal species from over 14,000 toxicology studies across six decades. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark of 18 non-clinical downstream tasks, incorporate an established benchmark of 9 clinical downstream tasks, and evaluate TOX-FM against state-of-the-art clinical PFMs across both non-clinical and clinical domains. Notably, we explore open questions surrounding domain-specific training and cross-domain generalization, offering insights into the opportunities and challenges of applying PFMs in the non-clinical domain.