# AI-Driven Digital Pathology: Deep Learning and Multimodal Integration for Precision Oncology

**Authors:** Hyun-Jong Jang, Sung Hak Lee

PMC · DOI: 10.3390/ijms27010379 · International Journal of Molecular Sciences · 2025-12-29

## TL;DR

This paper reviews how AI, especially transformer-based models, is transforming digital pathology to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment.

## Contribution

The paper highlights the novel use of transformer-based foundation models for scalable and generalizable digital pathology solutions.

## Key findings

- Transformer-based foundation models improve cross-cohort robustness in digital pathology tasks.
- Multimodal integration enables unified processing of histopathology, radiology, and molecular data.
- These models support few- and zero-shot inference across diverse pathology applications.

## Abstract

Pathology is fundamental to precision oncology, offering molecular and morphologic insights that enable personalized diagnosis and treatment. Recently, deep learning has demonstrated substantial potential in digital pathology, effectively addressing a wide range of diagnostic, prognostic, and biomarker-prediction tasks. Although early approaches based on convolutional neural networks had limited capacity to generalize across tasks and datasets, transformer-based foundation models have substantially advanced the field by enabling scalable representation learning, enhancing cross-cohort robustness, and supporting few- and even zero-shot inference across a wide range of pathology applications. Furthermore, the ability of foundation models to integrate heterogeneous data within a unified processing framework broadens the possibility of developing more generalizable models for medicine. These multimodal foundation models can accelerate the advancement of pathology-based precision oncology by enabling coherent interpretation of histopathology together with radiology, clinical text, and molecular data, thereby supporting more accurate diagnosis, prognostication, and therapeutic decision-making. In this review, we provide a concise overview of these advances and examine how foundation models are driving the ongoing evolution of pathology-based precision oncology.

## Full-text entities

- **Genes:** TP53 (tumor protein p53) [NCBI Gene 7157] {aka BCC7, BMFS5, LFS1, P53, TRP53}, FGFR3 (fibroblast growth factor receptor 3) [NCBI Gene 2261] {aka ACH, CD333, CEK2, HSFGFR3EX, JTK4}, CD274 (CD274 molecule) [NCBI Gene 29126] {aka ADMIO5, B7-H, B7H1, PD-L1, PDCD1L1, PDCD1LG1}, SPOP (speckle type BTB/POZ protein) [NCBI Gene 8405] {aka BTBD32, NEDMACE, NEDMIDF, NSDVS1, NSDVS2, TEF2}
- **Diseases:** WSIs (MESH:C564543), hepatocellular carcinoma (MESH:D006528), non-small cell lung cancer (MESH:D002289), bladder cancer (MESH:D001749), breast cancer (MESH:D001943), lung adenocarcinoma (MESH:D000077192), gastric cancer (MESH:D013274), lymph node metastases (MESH:D008207), DL (MESH:D007859), cancer (MESH:D009369), MSI (MESH:D053842), prostate cancer (MESH:D011471), glioma (MESH:D005910), melanoma (MESH:D008545), hallucination (MESH:D006212), injury to (MESH:D014947), colorectal cancer (MESH:D015179), endometrial cancer (MESH:D016889)
- **Chemicals:** H&amp;E (MESH:D006371), hematoxylin and eosin (-)
- **Species:** human gammaherpesvirus 4 (Epstein Barr virus, no rank) [taxon 10376], Homo sapiens (human, species) [taxon 9606]

## Full text

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## Figures

2 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12785522/full.md

## References

55 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12785522/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12785522