# MOOZY: A Patient-First Foundation Model for Computational Pathology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [LongNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000,000,000 Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02486/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Whole Slide Foundation Model for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19666/) (2024)
- [Virchow2: Scaling Self-Supervised Mixed Magnification Models in Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00738/) (2024)
- [Virchow: A Million-Slide Digital Pathology Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07778/) (2023)
- [PRISM: A Multi-Modal Generative Foundation Model for Slide-Level Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10254/) (2024)
- [Phikon-v2, A large and public feature extractor for biomarker prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09173/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Data Processing and Benchmarking of AI Models for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06750/) (2025)
- [Hibou: A Family of Foundational Vision Transformers for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05074/) (2024)
- [Molecular-driven Foundation Model for Oncologic Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16652/) (2025)
- [Distilling foundation models for robust and efficient models in digital pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16239/) (2025)
- [A Foundational Multimodal Vision Language AI Assistant for Human Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07814/) (2023)
- [Training state-of-the-art pathology foundation models with orders of magnitude less data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05186/) (2025)
- [PathOrchestra: A Comprehensive Foundation Model for Computational Pathology with Over 100 Diverse Clinical-Grade Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24345/) (2025)
- [A self-supervised framework for learning whole slide representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06188/) (2024)
- [TICON: A Slide-Level Tile Contextualizer for Histopathology Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21331/) (2025)
- [AtlasPatch: Scalable Foundation Model-based Tissue Detection and Patch Extraction for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03998/) (2026)
- [Whole Slide Concepts: A Supervised Foundation Model For Pathological Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05742/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Distributional Robustness Margin For Pathology Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25497/) (2026)
- [Gated Spatial Redundancy Projection for Pathology Transformer Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08374/) (2026)
- [BigCell: Generating Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14261/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computational pathology needs whole-slide image (WSI) foundation models that transfer across diverse clinical tasks, yet current approaches remain largely slide-centric, often depend on private data and expensive paired-report supervision, and do not explicitly model relationships among multiple slides from the same patient. We present MOOZY, a patient-first pathology foundation model in which the patient case, not the individual slide, is the core unit of representation. MOOZY explicitly models dependencies across all slides from the same patient via a case transformer during pretraining, combining multi-stage self-supervision with scaled low-cost task supervision. In Stage 1, we pretrain a vision-only slide encoder on 77,134 public slide feature grids using masked self-distillation. In Stage 2, we align these representations with clinical semantics using a case transformer and multi-task supervision over 333 tasks from 56 public datasets, including 205 classification and 128 survival tasks across four endpoints. Across sixteen held-out tasks, MOOZY improves macro weighted F1, balanced accuracy, and macro weighted ROC-AUC relative to PRISM by +4.19%, +7.93%, and +6.95%, respectively. MOOZY is also parameter efficient with 85.77M parameters, 14× smaller than GigaPath. These results suggest that patient-level pretraining yields transferable embeddings, providing a path toward scalable patient-first histopathology foundation models.