MorphDistill: Distilling Unified Morphological Knowledge from Pathology Foundation Models for Colorectal Cancer Survival Prediction

arXiv:2604.06390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Accurate survival prediction is essential for treatment stratification, yet existing pathology foundation models often overlook organ-specific features critical for CRC prognostication. Methods: We propose MorphDistill, a two-stage framework that distills complementary knowledge from multiple pathology foundation models into a compact CRC-sp