Foundation model-powered deep learning of endometrial histology for predicting the cumulative live birth of an in vitro fertilization cycle

Objective and reproducible assessment of endometrial receptivity is essential for optimizing in vitro fertilization (IVF) success, yet traditional histological dating suffers from observer variability. This study investigated whether deep learning of hematoxylin and eosin histology images could support cumulative live birth prediction in IVF. An end-to-end ResNet-18 was compared with a UNI2-h-based pipeline, using UNI2-h as a frozen feature extractor. Ten-fold cross-validation ensembles were developed from natural-cycle endometrial biopsies and evaluated in an internal held-out cohort with live birth outcomes. Additional phase-based evaluation was performed, which tested the performance in distinguishing LH + 7 versus non-LH + 7 phases. A luminal epithelium (LE)-focused design was also assessed to examine whether concentrating on maternal-embryo interface could improve fertility-oriented learning. The whole-slide ResNet-18 model performed well in internal outcome-based testing but near random in external phase-based testing. In contrast, the UNI2-h model with mean pooling and a multilayer perceptron classifier showed less divergent performance, with ensembled AUROCs of 0.74 ± 0.03 in internal outcome-based evaluation, and 0.90 ± 0.05 in external phase-based testing. Despite a smaller training set, LE-focused models retained comparable performance. In internal outcome-based testing, LE-focused ResNet-18 and UNI2-h models achieved AUROCs of 0.71 ± 0.03 and 0.74 ± 0.09 respectively. External phase-based testing yielded AUROCs of 0.80 ± 0.16 for ResNet-18, and 0.84 ± 0.06 for UNI2-h. Grad-CAM review of LE-focused ResNet-18 models showed attention commonly on LE-alone or mixed with adjacent stroma. In multimodal analyses, integrated models incorporating histology significantly outperformed the clinical metadata-only model. Integrated model’s feature weighting showed dominant histology outputs, smaller contributions from estradiol and maternal age, and negligible contributions from progesterone, endometrial thickness, and BMI. These findings support histology-based AI for fertility-oriented endometrial assessment and highlight biologically informed design and repurposed foundation models as promising bases for clinically meaningful prediction.