GloPath: An Entity‐Centric Foundation Model for Glomerular Lesion Assessment and Clinicopathological Insights
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.
Authors
- Shuyan Zhao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1896-0275)
- Zimo Zhao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8390-2699)
- Lianghui Zhu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3067-0210)
- Xinrui Chen
- Zi Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3953-0493)
- Ying Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9636-6300)
- Yanxia Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0400-5564)
- Yiqing Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8227-4598)
- Yingming Xu
- Zihan Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1540-6213)
- Qingxia Hou
- Yexing Zhang
- Peizhen Hu
- Hongjing Chen
- Xiaoqin Wang
- Qiming He
- Tian Guan
- Chao He
- Yonghong He (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9964-8901)
- Lili Ma
- Yifei Ma
- Jing Li
- Qiang Huang
- Shuang Ge
Institutions
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Jinan Institute of Quantum Technology (CN)
- Tsinghua–Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (CN)
- Ankang City Central Hospital (CN)
- Peng Cheng Laboratory (CN)
- Inspur (China) (CN)
- Science Oxford (GB)
- Xijing Hospital (CN)
- Fuzhou University (CN)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
- Air Force Medical University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Advanced Science
- Published
- 2026-04-15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202520580
- Primary Topic
- AI in cancer detection
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Shenzhen Municipal Engineering Corporation
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School