Paper Detail

Retrieval-Augmented Vision Foundation Models for Robust Leukemia Cell Classification across Multiple Microscopy Datasets

Carlos Zamora, Hiram Zuniga, Ulises Orozco-Rosas, Kenia Picos

arxiv Score 11.8

Published 2026-08-11 · First seen 2026-08-13

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Abstract

Leukemia cell image classification is challenged by real-world domain shifts from acquisition, staining, illumination, and site protocols, causing single-dataset models to generalize poorly in real clinical scenarios. This work presents a robust framework for leukemia classification across multiple heterogeneous datasets using a two-stage pipeline with a pretrained vision foundation model. Stage 1 performs binary classification (leukemia vs. non-leukemia) and is trained using 122,167 single-cell images. Stage 2 is conditionally applied to Stage 1 positives to perform subtype classification into Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), trained using 69,400 single-cell images. Labels are harmonized across five heterogeneous datasets to enable cross-dataset training, and performance is evaluated on a held-out dataset protocol to assess domain-shift generalization. Within this pipeline, three encoders are benchmarked (DinoBloom, pretrained on single-cell images; BiomedCLIP, pretrained on biomedical data; and CLIP as a general-purpose model) under linear probing, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and a Retrieval-Augmented Classification (RAC) module that retrieves the top-k most similar cell images to provide cytomorphological grounding. The objective is to quantify how much domain-specific pretraining contributes to performance under domain shift, and whether cost-effective adaptation and retrieval can be a viable alternative to expensive domain-specialized pretraining. The held-out protocol additionally serves as a diagnostic tool, revealing when classification performance is attributable to dataset-specific artifacts rather than to cytomorphological features.

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BibTeX

@article{zamora2026retrieval,
  title = {Retrieval-Augmented Vision Foundation Models for Robust Leukemia Cell Classification across Multiple Microscopy Datasets},
  author = {Carlos Zamora and Hiram Zuniga and Ulises Orozco-Rosas and Kenia Picos},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Leukemia cell image classification is challenged by real-world domain shifts from acquisition, staining, illumination, and site protocols, causing single-dataset models to generalize poorly in real clinical scenarios. This work presents a robust framework for leukemia classification across multiple heterogeneous datasets using a two-stage pipeline with a pretrained vision foundation model. Stage 1 performs binary classification (leukemia vs. non-leukemia) and is trained using 122,167 single-cell},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10657},
  keywords = {eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2608.10657},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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