AI and the World's Hard Problems · Medicine & drug discovery · Nature (computational biology) · 2026-10-16
Autonomous labeling of surgical resection margins using a foundation model
Assessing surgical resection margins in pathology is affected by manual inking errors, tissue distortion, and cautery damage. The authors developed a virtual inking network that uses a frozen foundation model and a small classifier to map the margin on whole-slide images without physical ink. On 20 slides from unseen tissue blocks, it reached about 73.3% region-level accuracy and produced overlays that qualitatively matched expert annotations. The results are proof-of-concept and need validation in larger, clinical cohorts.