journal article·2026-05Open access

GloPath: An Entity‐Centric Foundation Model for Glomerular Lesion Assessment and Clinicopathological Insights

Qiming He, Jing Li, Tian Guan, Yifei Ma, Zimo Zhao, Yanxia Wang, Hongjing Chen, Yingming Xu, Shuang Ge, Yexing Zhang, Yizhi Wang, Xinrui Chen, Lianghui Zhu, Yiqing Liu, Qingxia Hou, Shuyan Zhao, Xiaoqin Wang, Lili Ma, Peizhen Hu, Qiang Huang, Zihan Wang, Zhiyuan Shen, Junru Cheng, Siqi Zeng, Jiurun Chen, Zhen Song, Chao He, Zhe Wang, Yonghong He

Advanced Science· Volume 13· Issue 29

Abstract

ABSTRACT Glomerular pathology is central to the diagnosis and prognosis of renal diseases, yet the heterogeneity of glomerular morphology and fine‐grained lesion patterns remain challenging for current AI approaches. We present GloPath , an entity‐centric foundation model trained on over one million glomeruli extracted from 14 049 renal biopsy specimens using multi‐scale and multi‐view self‐supervised learning. GloPath addresses two major challenges in nephropathology: glomerular lesion assessment and clinicopathological insights discovery. For lesion assessment, GloPath was benchmarked across three independent cohorts on 52 tasks—including lesion recognition, grading, few‐shot classification, and cross‐modality diagnosis—outperforming state‐of‐the‐art methods in 42 tasks (80.8%). In the large‐scale real‐world study, it achieved an ROC‐AUC of 91.51% for lesion recognition, demonstrating strong robustness in routine clinical settings. For clinicopathological insights, GloPath systematically revealed statistically significant associations between glomerular morphological parameters and clinical indicators across 224 morphology–clinical variable pairs, demonstrating its capacity to connect tissue‐level pathology with patient‐level outcomes. Together, these results position GloPath as a scalable and interpretable platform for glomerular lesion assessment and clinicopathological discovery, representing a step toward clinically translatable AI in renal pathology.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: AI in cancer detection · Retinal Imaging and Analysis · Machine Learning in Healthcare

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Interdisciplinary Institute for Medical Engineering Fuzhou University Fuzhou China

Institute of Biopharmaceutical and Health Engineering, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School Tsinghua University Shenzhen China

Medical Optical Technology R&D Center Research Institute of Tsinghua Guangzhou China

Department of Pathology, School of Basic Medicine and Xijing Hospital Fourth Military Medical University Xi'an China

Department of Engineering Science University of Oxford Oxford UK

Department of Pathology Ankang Central Hospital Ankang China

Peng Cheng Laboratory Shenzhen China

Jinan Inspur Data Technology Co., Ltd. Jinan China

Department of Pathology, Xijing Hospital Fourth Military Medical University Xi'an China

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China · Shenzhen Municipal Engineering Corporation · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School

References (74)

Show source-provided references
1. 10.1038/s41581-024-00820-610.1038/s41581-024-00820-6 ↗
2. The Incidence of Acute Kidney Injury and Associated Hospital Mortality: A Retrospective Cohort Study of Over 100 000 Patients at Berlin's Charité Hospital
3. Murray I. V. · 2023
4. 10.1038/nrneph.2015.14910.1038/nrneph.2015.149 ↗
5. 10.2215/CJN.0940091310.2215/CJN.09400913 ↗
6. 10.1038/s41581-024-00907-010.1038/s41581-024-00907-0 ↗
7. 10.1172/jci.insight.16551510.1172/jci.insight.165515 ↗
8. 10.1097/MNH.000000000000059810.1097/MNH.0000000000000598 ↗
9. 10.3390/diagnostics1111198310.3390/diagnostics11111983 ↗
10. 10.1186/s12967-024-05221-810.1186/s12967-024-05221-8 ↗
11. R.Deng T.Yao Y.Tang et al. “Kpis 2024 Challenge: Advancing Glomerular Segmentation from Patch‐to Slide‐Level ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2502.07288(2025).
12. 10.31662/jmaj.2024-020610.31662/jmaj.2024-0206 ↗
13. 10.1038/s41467-025-58796-110.1038/s41467-025-58796-1 ↗
14. N.Aben E. D.deJong I.Gatopoulos et al. “Towards Large‐Scale Training of Pathology Foundation Models ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2404.15217(2024).
15. 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2025.11003110.1016/j.compbiomed.2025.110031 ↗
16. M.Bilal M.Raza Y.Altherwy et al. “Foundation Models in Computational Pathology: A Review of Challenges Opportunities and Impact ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2502.08333(2025).
17. 10.1016/j.dib.2020.10531410.1016/j.dib.2020.105314 ↗
18. 10.4103/ajm.ajm_136_1910.4103/ajm.ajm_136_19 ↗
19. 10.1016/j.autrev.2014.02.00710.1016/j.autrev.2014.02.007 ↗
20. Woroniecki R. P. · 2009 · 412
21. 10.1159/00054249710.1159/000542497 ↗
22. 10.1159/00054531110.1159/000545311 ↗
23. J.Song X.Cui S.Yuan et al. “Immunofluorescence Staining Profiles of Glomerular Diseases: A Single‐Center Retrospective Study ”Available at SSRN 5168817.
24. 10.1016/j.cmpb.2019.10527310.1016/j.cmpb.2019.105273 ↗
25. 10.1159/00053475510.1159/000534755 ↗
26. Unveiling Mechanisms Underlying Kidney Function Changes During Sex Hormone Therapy
27. 10.1053/j.ackd.2015.08.00410.1053/j.ackd.2015.08.004 ↗
28. 10.1371/journal.pone.027223710.1371/journal.pone.0272237 ↗
29. 10.1681/ASN.201712130510.1681/ASN.2017121305 ↗
30. 10.1038/s41467-023-36173-010.1038/s41467-023-36173-0 ↗
31. 10.1038/s41598-024-68406-710.1038/s41598-024-68406-7 ↗
32. 10.1038/s41581-023-00799-610.1038/s41581-023-00799-6 ↗
33. V. W.BergerandY.Zhou “Kolmogorov–Smirnov Test: Overview ”Wiley StatsRef: Statistics Reference Online(2014).10.1002/9781118445112.stat06558 ↗
34. Kruskal‐Wallis Test
35. 10.1016/j.ekir.2019.04.00810.1016/j.ekir.2019.04.008 ↗
36. 10.1016/j.compmedimag.2022.10210410.1016/j.compmedimag.2022.102104 ↗
37. 10.3390/electronics903050310.3390/electronics9030503 ↗
38. 10.1016/j.ajpath.2021.05.00410.1016/j.ajpath.2021.05.004 ↗
39. Mlp‐Unet: Glomerulus Segmentation
40. 10.1117/1.JMI.9.5.05240810.1117/1.JMI.9.5.052408 ↗
41. 10.3390/math1011193410.3390/math10111934 ↗
42. 10.1117/1.JMI.8.6.06750110.1117/1.JMI.8.6.067501 ↗
43. 10.1007/s44196-024-00523-710.1007/s44196-024-00523-7 ↗
44. 10.1016/j.neucom.2023.12694710.1016/j.neucom.2023.126947 ↗
45. 10.1681/ASN.202005059710.1681/ASN.2020050597 ↗
46. 10.1002/ima.2303210.1002/ima.23032 ↗
47. R.Strudel R.Garcia I.Laptev andC.Schmid InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision(2021) 7262–7272.
48. 10.1038/s41592-020-01008-z10.1038/s41592-020-01008-z ↗
49. 10.1159/00042876010.1159/000428760 ↗
50. 10.1002/ar.109232020510.1002/ar.1092320205 ↗
51. 10.1053/j.ajkd.2022.04.00510.1053/j.ajkd.2022.04.005 ↗
52. 10.1038/s41581-023-00775-010.1038/s41581-023-00775-0 ↗
53. Multimodal AI Generates Virtual Population for Tumor Microenvironment Modeling
54. AI‐Enabled Virtual Spatial Proteomics from Histopathology for Interpretable Biomarker Discovery in Lung Cancer
55. L.Yu M.Yin R.Deng et al. “Glo‐in‐One‐V2: Holistic Identification of Glomerular Cells Tissues and Lesions in Human and Mouse Histopathology ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2411.16961(2024).10.1117/1.JMI.12.6.061406 ↗
56. K.He X.Chen S.Xie Y.Li P.Dollár andR.Girshick InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(2022) 16000–16009.
57. H.Bao L.Dong S.Piao andF.Wei “Beit: Bert Pre‐Training of Image Transformers ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2106.08254(2021).
58. 10.1109/TDSC.2021.313542210.1109/TDSC.2021.3135422 ↗
59. K.He H.Fan Y.Wu S.Xie andR.Girshick InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(2020) 9729–9738.
60. X.ChenandK.He InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(2021) 15750–15758.
61. Bootstrap Your Own Latent–A New Approach to Self‐Supervised Learning
62. Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments
63. M.Oquab T.Darcet T.Moutakanni et al. “Dinov2: Learning Robust Visual Features Without Supervision ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2304.07193(2023).
64. 10.1109/TMI.2021.305602310.1109/TMI.2021.3056023 ↗
65. X.Wang S.Yang J.Zhang et al. InMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2021: 24th International Conference Strasbourg France September 27–October 1 2021 Proceedings Part VIII 24(Springer 2021) 186–195.10.1007/978-3-030-87237-3_18 ↗
66. A.Dosovitskiy L.Beyer A.Kolesnikov et al. “An Image Is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:2010.11929(2020).
67. K.He X.Zhang S.Ren andJ.Sun InProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision(2015) 1026–1034.10.1109/ICCV.2015.123 ↗
68. J.Deng W.Dong R.Socher L.‐J.Li K.Li andL.Fei‐Fei In2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(IEEE 2009) 248–255.10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848 ↗
69. 10.1038/s41591-024-02857-310.1038/s41591-024-02857-3 ↗
70. 10.1038/s41591-023-02504-310.1038/s41591-023-02504-3 ↗
71. 10.1038/s41591-024-02856-410.1038/s41591-024-02856-4 ↗
72. A.Radford J. W.Kim C.Hallacy et al. InInternational Conference on Machine Learning(PMLR 2021) 8748–8763.
73. 10.1111/2041-210X.1314010.1111/2041-210X.13140 ↗
74. L.McInnes J.Healy andJ.Melville “Umap: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction ”arXiv Preprint arXiv:1802.03426(2018).10.21105/joss.00861 ↗