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TIA Centre Seminars

The TIA seminar is a regular event, organised by the Tissue Image Analytics Centre, that usually takes place on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month between 2pm and 3pm. We invite researchers and leaders in the area of computational pathology and associated areas to discuss their work and stimulate thought-provoking discussions.

Take a look at the details of TIA seminars during 2023-24 academic year, most of which are also available on our YouTube channel.

Please contact the TIA Seminar Organiser Dr Adam Shephard via email (adam.shephard@warwick.ac.uk) if you are interested in attending a particular seminar below, or even giving a seminar. Alternatively, please fill-out the following form if you are interested in registering for the seminar series mailing list TIA Seminar Series Registration.

Note. We will continue to update this page with more details about the upcoming seminars.

Spring 2025

Date Speaker Title

7th January 2025 (Tuesday 10AM)

Azra Raza

Columbia University Medical Center

Redefining Hope: The Early Detection Revolution in Cancer Care

13th January 2025

Tong Ding

Harvard Medical School

Multimodal Whole Slide Foundation Model for Pathology

20th January 2025

Lee Cooper

Northwestern Medicine

TBC

3rd February 2025

Kun-Hsing Yu

Harvard Medical School

A pathology foundation model for cancer diagnosis and prognosis prediction

17th February 2025

Lucy Godson

National Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC)

TBC

TBC 2025

Danielle Belgrave

GSK

TBC

TBC 2025

Max Lu

Harvard Medical School

A Multimodal Generative AI Copilot for Human Pathology

Autumn 2024

Date Speaker Title

21st October 2024

Peter Neidlinger

Technical University Dresden

Benchmarking foundation models as feature extractors for weakly-supervised computational pathology

4th November 2024

Jack Breen

University of Leeds

Foundation Models and Multiple Instance Learning Methods for Ovarian Cancer Subtype Classification

11th November 2024

Nicholas Trahearn

Institute of Cancer Research

Investigating the Spatial Diversity of the Prostate Cancer Microenvironment using Artificial Intelligence

25th November 2024

Spencer Watson

University of Lausanne

Investigating Glioblastoma Recurrence with Spatial Multi-Omics

11th December 2024

(Wednesday 2PM)

Hanwen Xu

University of Washington

Towards learning patient level representations for better clinical outcome

Autumn 2024

Peter Neidlinger

Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany (click here for a short bio)
21 Oct 2024

Title: Benchmarking Foundation Models as Feature Extractors for Weakly-Supervised Computational Pathology

Abstract: Advancements in artificial intelligence have driven the development of numerous pathology foundation models capable of extracting clinically relevant information. However, there is currently limited literature independently evaluating these foundation models on truly external cohorts and clinically relevant tasks to uncover adjustments for future improvements. In this study, we benchmarked ten histopathology foundation models on 13 patient cohorts with 6,791 patients and 9,493 slides from lung, colorectal, gastric, and breast cancers. The models were evaluated on weakly-supervised tasks related to biomarkers, morphological properties, and prognostic outcomes. We show that a vision-language foundation model, CONCH, yielded the highest performance in 42% of tasks when compared to vision-only foundation models. The experiments reveal that foundation models trained on distinct cohorts learn complementary features to predict the same label and can be fused to outperform the current state of the art. Creating an ensemble of complementary foundation models outperformed CONCH in 66% of tasks. Moreover, our findings suggest that data diversity outweighs data volume for foundation models. Our work highlights actionable adjustments to improve pathology foundation models.

Watch the seminar by clicking here.


Jack Breen

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK (click here for a short bio)
4 Nov 2024

Title: Foundation Models and Multiple Instance Learning Methods for Ovarian Cancer Subtype Classification

Abstract: Ovarian cancer histological subtyping is a vital diagnostic task as the subtypes represent vastly different diseases with varied treatment options and prognoses. It has previously been an underrepresented task in AI subtyping research. In this talk, I will discuss my thesis "Artificial Intelligence for Ovarian Cancer Diagnosis from Digital Pathology Slides", which focuses on the robust validation of multiple instance learning (MIL) subtyping models, and explores factors limiting the clinical utility of these models. Histopathology foundation models show great promise across many tasks, but analyses have typically been limited by arbitrary hyperparameters that were not tuned to the specific task - we recently reported the most rigorous single-task validation of histopathology foundation models to date (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09990). We have also explored the effects of replacing standard MIL methods with a multi-resolution graph network (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18105), alongside earlier studies focused on the computational efficiency of classification. Our other work has included investigating the effects of chemotherapy on morphological subtyping, predicting treatment response effectiveness, and the automated detection of metastases in the lymph nodes and omentum. The modern classifiers have drastically improved diagnostic performance, though some vital hurdles still need to be cleared for these models to achieve clinical utility.

Watch the seminar by clicking here.


Dr Nicholas Trahearn

Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK (click here for a short bio)
11 Nov 2024

Title: Investigating the Spatial Diversity of the Prostate Cancer Microenvironment using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: Current prostate cancer risk predictors are not able to fully capture a patient’s risk of recurrence at the time of diagnosis, with cure rates varying substantially between patients in the same risk category, and is particularly challenging for the broad range of patients assessed as “high-risk”. In this talk I will discuss work from our recent Nature Cancer paper (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43018-024-00787-0), which assesses the impact of newly derived cancer evolution metrics as predictors of outcome within a clinical trial of high-risk prostate cancer patients. Patients enrolled on this trial received a combination of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), and have received a median of 12 years of post-treatment follow-up. Using over 600 FFPE blocks from patients enrolled on the trial, we generated a large dataset of matched histology and whole genome sequencing to test our evolutionary metrics. Through Artificial Intelligence based Digital Pathology tools, we characterised the tumour microenvironment, at diagnosis, on a per-gland and cellular level. From this, we saw that our AI-derived Gleason grading was able to outperform that of the trial pathologist, raising interesting questions regarding current grading guidelines. Furthermore, our new measure of morphological evolvability was shown to be an independent predictor of prostate cancer recurrence and metastasis, events that would occur up to a decade later. Remarkably, these patterns were also reflected in our analysis of genomic evolvability and, when combined, produced a prediction of patient outcome that was stronger than the sum of its parts. By encapsulating different aspects of cancer evolution at different scales, this study demonstrates the added value of a multi-modal strategy to prostate cancer risk prediction.

Watch the seminar by clicking here.


Dr Spencer Watson

University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland (click here for a short bio)
25 Nov 2024

Title: Investigating Glioblastoma Recurrence with Spatial Multi-Omics

Abstract: Glioblastoma recurrence is currently inevitable despite advances in standard-of-care treatment. An alternative approach of targeting the tumor microenvironment, specifically tumor-associated macrophages via CSF-1R inhibition was found to dramatically regress established tumors in preclinical trials. While tumor regression was sustained in ~50% of individuals, recurrent tumors emerged over time in the remaining subset. These recurrences were ubiquitously associated with fibrotic scars that had formed during treatment. This same fibrotic response to treatment was also observed following surgical resection, radiotherapy, and in patient recurrence samples. Investigating the complex evolving post-treatment tumor landscape required integrating multiple -omics approaches with new spatially resolved transcriptomics. Spatial multi-omics analyses of the post-treatment tumor microenvironment identified specific fibrotic domains as pro-tumor survival niches that encapsulated surviving glioma cells, which inhibited immune surveillance while maintaining the tumor cells in a dormant state. Integrated analyses revealed specific pathways in the initiation of fibrosis that could be targeted in combination with anti-glioma therapy. These combinatorial therapies inhibited treatment-associated fibrosis, and significantly improved survival in preclinical trials of anti-CSF-1R therapy.

Watch the seminar by clicking here.


Hanwen Xu

University of Washington, Seattle, USA (click here for a short bio)
11 Dec 2024

Please note this seminar will be held on Wednesday at 2PM.

Title: Towards learning patient level representations for better clinical outcome

Abstract: Multi-modal medical data, including radiology and pathology imaging data, and genomics data are generated over the long cancer patient journey. These data are pivotal in guiding clinicians in clinical decision making, thus greatly impact how people optimize the clinical outcome. The complexity of interpreting massive multi-modal medical data for each individual patient highlights the need for a computational approach to learn the comprehensive representation. Developing such a multi-modal foundation model is faced with significant challenges, especially considering the long patient context. Here we develop a two-stage model architecture that can efficiently handle the long context problem in the medical domain. We primarily start by applying our model to whole slide pathology images, and trained the first slide-level foundation model GigaPath that shows superior performance on 25 subtyping and pathomics tasks. GigaPath is also aligned with real-world pathology reports, and shows capability in handling multi-modal tasks. Taken together, GigaPath is a good starting point towards developing multi-modal medical foundation models for better clinical outcome.

Watch the seminar by clicking here.


Spring 2025

Prof Azra Raza

Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA (click here for a short bio)
6 Jan 2025

This is a special event, being held on Monday from 7-8:30PM, in person, at The Oculus Auditorium (OC1.05).

Title: Rhymes of Healing: Bridging Poetry & Medicine

Abstract: Few art forms can articulate the ineffable, foster resilience, and provide solace in the face of life’s trials more beautifully than poetry. Yet, its profound healing potential has not been mined for more practical applications to the daily lives of both the doctor and patient. Drawing from personal experiences in medicine and cancer research, as well as a lifelong devotion to poetry, I will examine how Urdu poetry, with its intricate metaphors and deeply emotional resonance, and English poetry, with its rich narrative and structural diversity, offer complementary pathways to healing. Together, they embody a universal language of empathy and connection that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers. The rhymes of healing serve as a therapeutic lens through which we can process grief, find strength, and celebrate hope. And then, there is the pure ecstasy of apprehending the deeper meaning of poetry’s ability to capture the soul in a moment of reflection.

To attend this event, please register here.


Prof Azra Raza

Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA (click here for a short bio)
7 Jan 2025

This is a special edition of our TIA Centre Seminar Series, being held on Tuesday at 10AM.

Title: Redefining Hope: The Early Detection Revolution in Cancer Care

Abstract: The truth is, for many patients, cancer therapy today is hardly better than it was 100 years ago. On top of that, chemotherapy medicines, especially the newest advanced drugs, leave bereaved families with staggering medical bills they have no ability to pay. Doctors universally agree the best way to slay the dragon of cancer is by early detection. I have advocated finding cancer before it finds us for three decades. My ideas about prevention finally gained traction because recent discoveries revealed the ways early and even recurring cancers originate. We believe our approach to cancer prevention will be affordable worldwide. Although I practice medicine in New York, in treating cases in my native Pakistan I saw patients so poor they could not afford medicine without letting their children go hungry. They could choose medicine or food, but not both. Preventing cancer would make such vile choices go away.

To prove our approach, we focus on detecting The First Cell Stage of cancer in patients who have already survived cancer once. About 20% of new cancers are diagnosed in people who have already had a different type of cancer before. We will monitor Cancer Survivors using highly sophisticated technology to catch the very earliest cells and bodily signals associated with cancer inception. Technology is evolving in our labs to neutralize these early cells and signals so cancer can be prevented altogether. Our long-term goal is to develop implantable biosensors for continuous, 24/7 monitoring from birth to death, from womb to tomb, making real-time intervention possible at the First Cell Stage rather than waiting for it to develop even to Stage 1 cancer.


Tong Ding

Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
13 Jan 2025

Title: Multimodal Whole Slide Foundation Model for Pathology

Abstract: The field of computational pathology has been transformed with recent advances in foundation models that encode histopathology region-of-interests (ROIs) into versatile and transferable feature representations via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, translating these advancements to address complex clinical challenges at the patient and slide level remains constrained by limited clinical data in disease specific cohorts, especially for rare clinical conditions. We propose TITAN, a multimodal whole slide foundation model pretrained using 335,645 WSIs via visual self-supervised learning and vision-language alignment with corresponding pathology reports and 423,122 synthetic captions generated from a multimodal generative AI copilot for pathology. Without any finetuning or requiring clinical labels, TITAN can extract general-purpose slide representations and generate pathology reports that generalize to resource-limited clinical scenarios such as rare disease retrieval and cancer prognosis. We evaluate TITAN on diverse clinical tasks and find that TITAN outperforms both ROI and slide foundation models across machine learning settings such as linear probing, few-shot and zero-shot classification, rare cancer retrieval and cross-modal retrieval, and pathology report generation. The model is publicly accessible at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/TITAN.


Prof Lee Cooper

Northwestern Medicine, Chicago, USA
20 Jan 2025

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC


Prof Kun-Hsing Yu

Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
3 Feb 2025

Title: A pathology foundation model for cancer diagnosis and prognosis prediction

Abstract: TBC


Dr Lucy Godson

National Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC), Leeds, UK
17 Feb 2025

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC


Dr Danielle Belgrave

GSK, London, UK
TBC 2025

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC


Dr Ming Lu

Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
TBC 2025

Title: A Multimodal Generative AI Copilot for Human Pathology

Abstract: TBC