Enhancing zero-shot brain tumor subtype classification via fine-grained patch-text alignment

Abstract

The fine-grained classification of brain tumor subtypes from histopathological whole slide images is highly challenging due to subtle morphological variations and the scarcity of annotated data. Although vision-language models have enabled promising zero-shot classification, their ability to capture fine-grained pathological features remains limited, resulting in suboptimal subtype discrimination. To address these challenges, we propose the Fine-Grained Patch Alignment Network (FG-PAN), a novel zero-shot framework tailored for digital pathology. FG-PAN consists of two key modules: (1) a local feature refinement module that enhances patch-level visual features by modeling spatial relationships among representative patches, and (2) a fine-grained text description generation module that leverages large language models to produce pathology-aware, class-specific semantic prototypes. By aligning refined visual …