Hiring in life sciences? Share your open positions with our professional community. Read more Close

Advertisement

Pathology-CoT: learning visual chain-of-thought agents from expert whole-slide image diagnosis behaviour.

Created on 25 Jul 2026

Authors

Sheng Wang, Ruiming Wu, Charles Herndon, Songhao Li, Yihang Liu, Shunsuke Koga, Xiaowei Xu, David E Elder, Jonathan Alex Miles, Annie Jin, Ikuko Hirai, Meaghan Dougher, Jeanne Shen, Zhi Huang

Published in

Nature biomedical engineering. Jul 24, 2026. Epub Jul 24, 2026.

Abstract

Diagnosing a whole-slide image is an interactive, multistage process, yet practical agentic systems that navigate fields, adjust magnification and deliver explainable diagnoses remain lacking, largely because the tacit, experience-based viewing behaviour of expert pathologists is absent from model training data. Here we introduce Pathology-CoT, a framework that converts expert viewing chain-of-thought behaviour into scalable agent supervision through three contributions. First, an artificial intelligence session recorder unobtrusively captures routine navigation in standard whole-slide image viewers and converts raw logs into standardized behavioural commands and bounding boxes. Second, a human-in-the-loop review pipeline turns artificial intelligence-drafted rationales into paired 'where to look' and 'why it matters' supervision, enabling sixfold faster labelling. Third, using these data, we built Pathology-o3, a two-stage agent that proposes regions of interest and performs behaviour-guided reasoning. On gastrointestinal lymph node metastasis detection, Pathology-o3 outperformed state-of-the-art vision-language models, showed consistent gains across multiple vision-language model backbones and maintained strong performance on an independent external validation cohort.

PMID:
42498734
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 25 Jul 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Community rating n/a 0 votes
  • Reviewers' rating n/a 0 votes
  • Your rating

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 25
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement