Pathology Foundation Model Reveals Organs Age on Different Schedules

bravo_abad · x · 2026-08-31

Published in Nature Aging (2026), research by Anamika Yadav et al. utilizes UNI, a pretrained pathology vision transformer, to encode 30 million image patches from 25,306 biopsies across 40 tissues. Instead of predicting age directly, the PathStAR method measures changes in learned tissue representations between neighboring age windows to construct a trajectory through morphological space. This approach reveals that human organs age on different schedules. The work highlights a novel use case for foundation models: serving as measurement tools to discover system dynamics rather than just predicting labels.

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