2026

Thinking in Scales: Accelerating Gigapixel Pathology Image Analysis via Adaptive Continuous Reasoning

Thinking in Scales: Accelerating Gigapixel Pathology Image Analysis via Adaptive Continuous Reasoning

Traditional whole-slide image analysis relies on exhaustive patch-level processing that is computationally expensive at gigapixel scale. PathCTM formulates diagnosis as adaptive scale-space continuous reasoning, progressively moving from low-magnification global inspection to high-magnification local evidence gathering with dynamic scale switching, region pruning, and confidence-aware early stopping. It cuts required image patches and inference time by about 96% while maintaining slide-level AUC.

Recommended citation: Ge J, Zhan Y, Zhao W, Zhang D, Wang K, Liu J, Yang C, Li C, Zhang J, Dong Y, Zhang N, Liu Q, Crispin-Ortuzar M, Fu H, Li C, Gao Z. Thinking in Scales: Accelerating Gigapixel Pathology Image Analysis via Adaptive Continuous Reasoning. Accepted to the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.
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