Adversarial Hospital-Invariant Feature Learning for WSI Patch Classification (2508.14779v1)

Abstract: Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in whole-slide image (WSI) diagnosis. However, pathology images from different hospitals often vary due to differences in scanning hardware and preprocessing styles, which may lead PFMs to inadvertently learn hospital-specific features, posing risks for clinical deployment. In this work, we present the first systematic study of domain bias in PFMs arising from hospital source characteristics. Specifically, we (1) construct a pipeline for quantifying domain bias in PFMs, (2) evaluate and compare the performance of multiple models, and (3) propose a lightweight adversarial framework that removes latent hospital-specific features from frozen representations without modifying the encoder itself. By introducing a trainable adapter and a domain classifier connected through a gradient reversal layer (GRL), our method learns task-discriminative yet domain-invariant representations. Experiments on multi-center histopathology datasets demonstrate that our approach substantially reduces domain predictability while maintaining or even improving disease classification performance, particularly in out-of-domain (unseen hospital) scenarios. Further analyses, including hospital detection and feature space visualization, confirm the effectiveness of our method in mitigating hospital bias. We will provide our code based on acceptance.