Hibou (HistAI)

Hibou is a family of open pathology foundation models from HistAI, vision transformers pretrained with the DINOv2 self-supervised method on more than 1M slides. The two released sizes, Hibou-B and Hibou-L, are published under an Apache 2.0 licence, which allows research and commercial use without negotiation and has made them common starting points for smaller groups building slide classifiers. The 2024 arXiv paper reports the models and their benchmark performance. Hibou is smaller in scale than the leading pathology models, so groups with demanding tasks may see better results from larger backbones, and like all such models it needs task-specific validation before clinical use. For a newcomer: Hibou is a free, permissively licensed pathology model that anyone can download and fine-tune.