Evidence Field for Histopathology: Cross-Centre Evaluation and Replayable Spatial Decisions

Abstract

Histopathology classifiers must transfer across acquisition sites while exposing evidence that can be checked independently. Evidence Field couples learned image measurements and spatial classification with a native covering-program record. We evaluate this architecture on all 455,954 released CAMELYON17-WILDS patches, using patient-separated source partitions and two held-out hospital centres. Eighteen from-scratch fits compare four Evidence Field objectives with residual convolutional and compact vision-transformer classifiers. Checkpoints, temperatures and review thresholds are selected using source validation. The source-selected paired-cross-entropy ensemble achieves areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.9356 and 0.9453, with accuracies of 84.46% and 86.77% at the two held-out centres. Corresponding convolutional values are 0.7352 and 0.7656, and transformer values are 0.8502 and 0.7924. Evidence Field has 10,550 trainable parameters per member and additionally returns selected covers, signed region and interaction terms, contextual dependencies and independently reconstructible predictions. Patient-cluster intervals, calibration, source-fixed review policies and recorded training resources characterize the results. A 340-image, three-member audit reconstructs probability mixtures and 6,120 class programs under three rigid views. The evaluation supports cross-centre discrimination and reproducible computation for these implemented models; unequal family tuning, previously examined public targets and limited patient groups constrain broader interpretation.