Shaoting Zhang

The advent of foundation models (FMs) as an emerging suite of AI techniques has struck a wave of opportunities in computational healthcare. The interactive nature of these models, guided by pre-training data and human instructions, has ignited a data-centric AI paradigm that emphasizes better data characterization, quality, and scale. In healthcare AI, obtaining and processing high-quality clinical data records has been a longstanding challenge, encompassing data quantity, annotation, patient privacy, and ethics. In this survey, we investigate a wide range of data-centric approaches in the FM era (from model pre-training to inference) towards improving the healthcare workflow. We discuss key perspectives in AI security, assessment, and alignment with human values. Finally, we offer a promising outlook on FM-based analytics to enhance patient outcomes and clinical workflows in the evolving landscape of healthcare and medicine. We provide an up-to-date list of healthcare-related foundation models and datasets at https://github.com/Yunkun-Zhang/Data-Centric-FM-Healthcare .

The complexity and variability of high-resolution pathological images present significant challenges in computational pathology. While AI-driven pathology foundation models have advanced the field, they require large-scale datasets, substantial storage, and significant computational resources, as well as rigorous validation for clinical applicability. We present PathOrchestra, a versatile pathology foundation model trained on 287,424 slides from 21 tissue types across three centers. Evaluated on 112 tasks from 61 private and 51 public datasets, covering digital slide preprocessing, pan-cancer classification, lesion identification, multi-cancer subtype classification, biomarker assessment, gene expression prediction, and structured report generation. Across 27,755 whole slide images and 9,415,729 region-of-interest images, it achieved over 0.950 accuracy in 47 tasks, including pan-cancer classification, lymphoma subtyping, and bladder cancer screening. It is the first to generate structured reports for colorectal cancer and lymphoma. Overall, PathOrchestra demonstrates the clinical readiness of large-scale self-supervised pathology foundation models, achieving high accuracy and offering potential to digital medicine integration.

An explainable deep learning model using multiparametric MRI features demonstrated good performance in diagnosis of focal liver lesions and improved diagnostic accuracy, confidence, and efficiency of junior radiologists.

Oral and maxillofacial radiology plays a vital role in dental healthcare, but radiographic image interpretation is limited by a shortage of trained professionals. While AI approaches have shown promise, existing dental AI systems are restricted by their single-modality focus, task-specific design, and reliance on costly labeled data, hindering their generalization across diverse clinical scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce DentVFM, the first family of vision foundation models (VFMs) designed for dentistry. DentVFM generates task-agnostic visual representations for a wide range of dental applications and uses self-supervised learning on DentVista, a large curated dental imaging dataset with approximately 1.6 million multi-modal radiographic images from various medical centers. DentVFM includes 2D and 3D variants based on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. To address gaps in dental intelligence assessment and benchmarks, we introduce DentBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering eight dental subspecialties, more diseases, imaging modalities, and a wide geographical distribution. DentVFM shows impressive generalist intelligence, demonstrating robust generalization to diverse dental tasks, such as disease diagnosis, treatment analysis, biomarker identification, and anatomical landmark detection and segmentation. Experimental results indicate DentVFM significantly outperforms supervised, self-supervised, and weakly supervised baselines, offering superior generalization, label efficiency, and scalability. Additionally, DentVFM enables cross-modality diagnostics, providing more reliable results than experienced dentists in situations where conventional imaging is unavailable. DentVFM sets a new paradigm for dental AI, offering a scalable, adaptable, and label-efficient model to improve intelligent dental healthcare and address critical gaps in global oral healthcare.

Classification of pathological images is the basis for automatic cancer diagnosis. Despite that deep learning methods have achieved remarkable performance, they heavily rely on labeled data, demanding extensive human annotation efforts. In this study, we present a novel human annotation-free method by leveraging pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Without human annotation, pseudo-labels of the training set are obtained by utilizing the zero-shot inference capabilities of VLM, which may contain a lot of noise due to the domain gap between the pre-training and target datasets. To address this issue, we introduce VLM-CPL, a novel approach that contains two noisy label filtering techniques with a semi-supervised learning strategy. Specifically, we first obtain prompt-based pseudo-labels with uncertainty estimation by zero-shot inference with the VLM using multiple augmented views of an input. Then, by leveraging the feature representation ability of VLM, we obtain feature-based pseudo-labels via sample clustering in the feature space. Prompt-feature consensus is introduced to select reliable samples based on the consensus between the two types of pseudo-labels. We further propose High-confidence Cross Supervision by to learn from samples with reliable pseudo-labels and the remaining unlabeled samples. Additionally, we present an innovative open-set prompting strategy that filters irrelevant patches from whole slides to enhance the quality of selected patches. Experimental results on five public pathological image datasets for patch-level and slide-level classification showed that our method substantially outperformed zero-shot classification by VLMs, and was superior to existing noisy label learning methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HiLab-git/VLM-CPL.

The generalization ability of foundation models in the field of computational pathology (CPath) is crucial for their clinical success. However, current foundation models have only been evaluated on a limited type and number of tasks, leaving their generalization ability unclear. We establish a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the performance of off-the-shelf foundation models across six distinct clinical task types, encompassing a total of 72 specific tasks. Our findings reveal that existing foundation models excel at certain task types but struggle to effectively handle the full breadth of clinical tasks. To improve the generalization of pathology foundation models, we propose a unified knowledge distillation framework consisting of both expert and self knowledge distillation, where the former allows the model to learn from the knowledge of multiple expert models, while the latter leverages self distillation to enable image representation learning via local–global alignment. On the basis of this framework, we develop a Generalizable Pathology Foundation Model (GPFM). Evaluated on the established benchmark, GPFM achieves an average rank of 1.6, ranking first in 42 tasks, positioning it as a promising method for feature representation in CPath.