From cells to patients: Multiscale computational pathology in the era of foundation models and vision-language systems

Computational pathology spans biological scales from cells and tissue regions to whole-slide and patient-level tasks, but traditional task-specific systems often remain annotation-heavy and scale-isolated. This review surveys how pathology foundation models and vision-language systems are shifting the field toward general-purpose representations, multiscale integration, data-efficient learning, and semantic clinical reasoning.
Recommended citation: Gao Z, Ge J, Lu J, Wu L, Clayton H, Zhang D, Liu J, Machado I P, Chen Y, Crispin-Ortuzar M, Li C. From cells to patients: Multiscale computational pathology in the era of foundation models and vision-language systems[J]. Intelligent Oncology, 2026, 2(3): 100074.
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