Cancer3.AIAI in OncologyAI Models › Phikon-v2
Foundation model Open weights Research use only pathology

Phikon-v2

ViT-L pathology encoder trained with DINOv2 on PANCAN-XL — 456 million tiles from 58,359 whole-slide images that mix public cohorts (TCGA, CPTAC, GTEx and others) with private data — positioned for biomarker prediction.

315 410 downloads / month ♥ 43 updated 2026-01-19

At a glance

DeveloperOwkin
Released2024-09-13
Licenceowkin non-commercial
AvailabilityOpen weights
KindFoundation model
Regulatory statusResearch use only
Parameters~307M

What it does

Tile embeddings evaluated mainly on predicting molecular biomarkers and clinical outcomes from H&E; successor to Phikon (ViT-B, TCGA-only).

Tasks, data types and cancers

Clinical settingBasic researchPrognosis
CancerPan-cancer
Input224×224 tile at 20×
Output1,024-dim embedding

Architecture

FamilyVision Transformer
BackboneViT-L/16
Parameters~307M
Pre-trainingDINOv2

Training data

PANCAN-XL: 456M tiles from 58,359 WSIs across more than 30 cancer types; roughly half public (TCGA, CPTAC, GTEx, other public cohorts) and half private.

Training set size58,359 WSIs / 456M tiles
InstitutionsOwkin + public cohorts

Linked datasets

Evaluation

Benchmark / datasetMetricValueExternal validationSource
biomarker prediction suite (TCGA and external cohorts) AUROC competitive with UNI/Virchow; reported per task in paper yes Source

How to run

# generic timm loader — check the model card for the exact init args and image normalisation
import timm, torch
from huggingface_hub import login
login()  # gated repos: accept the licence on huggingface.co first
model = timm.create_model('hf-hub:owkin/phikon-v2', pretrained=True)
model.eval()
cfg = timm.data.resolve_data_config({}, model=model)
transform = timm.data.create_transform(**cfg)
# emb = model(transform(tile).unsqueeze(0))  # 1 x D tile embedding
Librarytransformers

Loads with AutoModel; note that TCGA and CPTAC are IN the pretraining set, so do not treat those as external test sets for this model.

Regulatory status and intended use

Regulatory statusResearch use only
Intended useResearch.

Source →

Regulatory status is quoted from the source linked above and can change. Research-use-only models must not be used for clinical decisions.

Limitations and bias

  • Public benchmarks built on TCGA/CPTAC are contaminated for this model — evaluate on data outside PANCAN-XL.
  • Non-commercial terms.

Sources

  1. Filiot A et al. Phikon-v2, A large and public feature extractor for biomarker prediction. arXiv 2024
  2. Hugging Face — owkin/phikon-v2

This page is educational — it is not medical advice and does not replace consultation with an oncologist. Diagnostic and treatment decisions are made solely by specialist physicians.