Prototype-based AI triage for 3D pathology

Non-destructive 3D pathology enables high-resolution slide-free imaging of intact clinical specimens, providing comprehensive visualization of tissue structures beyond what conventional slide-based 2D histopathology can provide. However, the scale and complexity of volumetric datasets make exhaustive manual review impractical, motivating AI-assisted triage methods to select a small number of high-risk 2D slices for pathologist review. While prior triage models have shown promise, interpretability is poor and performance can be suboptimal, especially in the nascent field of 3D pathology in which labeled data is limited. We present SCOPE, a Segmentation-guided CrOss-slice PrototypE learning framework for comprehensive risk assessment of 2D levels within 3D pathology datasets. SCOPE combines (i) clustering-based pretraining on large-scale unlabeled volumetric data to initialize morphology-aware prototypes, (ii) segmentation-derived structural priors from publicly available models to guide proto-type learning, and (iii) cross-slice (2.5D) prototype aggregation across neighboring slices to generate slice-level risk predictions. In prostate and esophageal data cohorts, SCOPE consistently outperforms attention-based and prototype-based multiple instance learning baselines for both binary and multiclass prediction tasks, enabling depth-resolved risk profiling for 3D triage based on morphological prototypes that are interpretable to pathologists.