Can You Trust Frozen Hematology Foundation Models under Acquisition Shift?

📅 2026-08-25
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过评估15个冻结编码器在不同数据集上的准确性和校准性,解决了血液学基础模型在实际应用中跨扫描仪、站点、染色和制备流程的可靠性问题。
📝 Abstract
Frozen hematology foundation-model (FM) embeddings reach near-saturated in-domain white-blood-cell (WBC) accuracy, but clinical deployment demands reliability across scanners, sites, stains and preparation pipelines. We audit 15 frozen encoders (hematology, pathology, and general vision) across four public single-cell acquisition domains along two axes: accuracy robustness and calibration. In-domain linear-probe macro-F1 is saturated (0.98-0.997), yet cross-dataset macro-F1 drops 34-72% and rankings re-order: DinoBloom-L, the in-domain best, falls to 10th of 15 on the most-shifted target (MLL23) at the benchmark's shared 224-px input, behind RedDino and several general and pathology encoders. Rank transfer is probe-dependent: 1-NN retrieval is more stable on average than a source-fitted linear head (median $ρ$ 0.65 vs 0.45), but neither probe universally predicts target robustness. Calibration also collapses: source-trained probes are nearly calibrated in-domain (expected calibration error, ECE, 0.004) but confidently wrong off-domain (ECE 0.35), and source-fitted temperature scaling transfers poorly. We further audit pretraining exposure and identify MLL23 as DinoBloom's internal cohort; because DinoBloom's only held-out dataset is also our source domain, this benchmark cannot isolate exposure from scanner-associated shift. Label-free adaptation and marginal-entropy-based model selection appear safe under balanced evaluation but fail under realistic WBC class-prior shift. Class-Balanced Re-standardization (CBR), a training-free pseudo-label-balanced feature normalization, improves all evaluated target-prior scenario means and partially improves calibration, although encoder-level exceptions and residual miscalibration remain. Hematology FM benchmarks must therefore jointly audit accuracy, calibration, exposure, and class-prior robustness.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Frozen Hematology Foundation Models
Acquisition Shift
Robustness
Calibration
Clinical Deployment
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Frozen Hematology Foundation Models
Cross-Dataset Robustness
Calibration Collapse
Class-Balanced Re-standardization (CBR)
J
Jai Kumar Sharma
Virginia Tech
P
Peeyush Tapadiya
Accenture