📄
Abstract - Pan-FM: A Pan-Organ Foundation Model with Saliency-Guided Masking for Missing Robustness
Foundation models (FMs) have shown great promise in medical imaging, but most FMs are trained on unimodal data within isolated domains, such as brain MRI alone. Human aging and disease arise through coordinated biological processes across organs, therefore motivating multimodal FMs that learn whole-body representations. A key challenge, however, is that real-world multimodal biomedical data are often missing not at random, which can reduce power, limit generalizability, and introduce bias. We propose Pan-FM, a pan-organ foundation model pre-trained on imaging from seven organs (Brain, Heart, Adipose, Liver, Kidney, Spleen, and Pancreas) under realistic missing-organ scenarios. Pan-FM uses a unified backbone that handles organ missingness during both training and inference, and is pre-trained with masking-based self-distillation. We find that naive multimodal pre-training leads to dominant-organ shortcut learning bias, with the model over-relying on dominant organs such as adipose and heart. To address this, we introduce Saliency-Guided Masking (SGM), which uses the model attention distribution to adaptively mask dominant organs during pre-training, thus encouraging more balanced cross-organ, whole-body learning. Notably, SGM introduces negligible computational overhead and can be seamlessly integrated into existing self-supervised learning frameworks to improve multi-organ representation learning. On the UK Biobank, Pan-FM achieves stronger prediction across 13 disease categories and 14 single disease entities than single-organ and multi-organ baselines, with improved robustness under missing-organ settings. Pan-FM serves as a scalable solution to realistic modality-missingness in multimodal learning in system neuroscience and as a step toward more generalizable whole-body FMs.
Pan-FM:一种具有显著性引导掩码的跨器官基础模型,用于应对数据缺失鲁棒性 /
Pan-FM: A Pan-Organ Foundation Model with Saliency-Guided Masking for Missing Robustness
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出了一个名为 Pan-FM 的跨器官基础模型,它能同时学习大脑、心脏、肝脏等七个器官的影像特征,并通过一种巧妙的“显著性引导掩码”技术,自动减少模型对强势器官的过度依赖,从而在部分器官数据缺失的真实场景下仍能稳定预测多种疾病。