Assessing Foundation Models for Computational Pathology in Endometrial Cancer

Computational pathology leverages deep learning to extract clinically relevant information from digitized tumor slides, predicting histopathological subtypes, molecular alterations, and patient outcomes. Recent pipelines increasingly rely on foundation models trained on large pan-cancer data sets to generate generalizable features. In endometrial cancer (EC), their comparative performance for clinical diagnostic tasks remains unexplored. This study evaluates the performance of 7 state-of-the-art foundation models across morphological, molecular, and prognostic tasks using a large EC data set of 3293 patients from randomized trials and clinical cohorts. In addition, their performance was compared with 2 versions of an EC-specific feature extractor (EsVIT) exclusively trained on EC. The foundation models H-OPTIMUS-0, CONCH, and VIRCHOW2 achieved the highest mean performance, but the best-performing foundation model varied by task. The top-performing foundation model outperformed EsVIT across all tasks, which highlights the superiority of foundation models over the domain-specific feature extractor EsVIT in EC. Selecting the optimal foundation model for novel tasks remains challenging due to performance plateaus and limited information on the training data sets, requiring rigorous benchmarking and domain insights to reach maximum potential.