AI & ML Open Release

Releases weights for LEMON, a foundation model for single-cell nuclear morphology trained on millions of pathology images.

March 30, 2026

Original Paper

LEMON: a foundation model for nuclear morphology in Computational Pathology

Loïc Chadoutaud, Alice Blondel, Hana Feki, Jacqueline Fontugne, Emmanuel Barillot, Thomas Walter

arXiv · 2603.25802

The Takeaway

While patch-level pathology models are common, single-cell foundation models are rare. This democratizes high-performance cell-level representations for cancer research and precision medicine.

From the abstract

Computational pathology relies on effective representation learning to support cancer research and precision medicine. Although self-supervised learning has driven major progress at the patch and whole-slide image levels, representation learning at the single-cell level remains comparatively underexplored, despite its importance for characterizing cell types and cellular phenotypes. We introduce LEMON (Learning Embeddings from Morphology Of Nuclei), a self-supervised foundation model for scalabl