# CanvOI, an Oncology Intelligence Foundation Model: Scaling FLOPS Differently

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02885/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04690/) (2022)
- [BRACS: A Dataset for BReAst Carcinoma Subtyping in H&E Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04740/) (2021)
- [EVA-CLIP-18B: Scaling CLIP to 18 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04252/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representations in Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11057/) (2021)
- [Hibou: A Family of Foundational Vision Transformers for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05074/) (2024)
- [Computational Pathology at Health System Scale -- Self-Supervised Foundation Models from Three Billion Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07033/) (2023)
- [RECLIP: Resource-efficient CLIP by Training with Small Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06028/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapidly evolving field of digital oncopathology faces significant challenges, including the need to address diverse and complex clinical questions, often involving rare conditions, with limited availability of labeled data. These limitations hinder the development of robust AI-driven tools in the biomedical space, where accuracy in probabilistic determinations is of utmost importance. To address this, digital pathology foundation models have begun to emerge, typically developed with the size and diversity of the pre-training dataset and model parameters in mind. Here, we present CanvOI, a ViT-g/10-based foundation model designed to enhance the capabilities of digital pathology by addressing these challenges through a different approach. Considering the unique nature of oncologic histopathological images and the requirements from the embeddings to provide meaningful representations for Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) downstream models, we chose to modify the input image characteristics. By introducing larger tile sizes (380 x 380 pixels) and smaller patch sizes (10 x 10 pixels), we were able to optimize the model's performance, pushing computational resources in a new direction and achieving state-of-the-art performance on cancer-related benchmarks. CanvOI demonstrated a 1.5-7.4% improvement in averaged AUC compared to other leading foundation models built for digital pathology. Moreover, our results demonstrate that CanvOI significantly outperformed the other models, with the performance gap widening substantially when trained on just 10% of the initial cohort. This work highlights an alternative approach that, if integrated with traditional development approaches, has the potential to advance Oncology Intelligence (OI), overcome some of the current barriers and ultimately improve the clinical outcome of cancer patients.