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.

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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

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article

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

Shuyan Zhao, Zimo Zhao, Lianghui Zhu, Xinrui Chen et al.
Advanced Science
AI in cancer detection
article

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

Shuyan Zhao, Zimo Zhao, Lianghui Zhu, Xinrui Chen, Zi Wang, Ying Wang, Yanxia Wang, Yiqing Liu, Yingming Xu, Zihan Wang, Qingxia Hou, Yexing Zhang, Peizhen Hu, Hongjing Chen, Xiaoqin Wang, Qiming He, Tian Guan, Chao He, Yonghong He, Lili Ma, Yifei Ma, Jing Li, Qiang Huang, Shuang Ge
article en

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.

Advanced Science
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)
Shenzhen Municipal Engineering Corporation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School
Openalex Percentile: Top 26%
AI in cancer detection
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