PathReasoning: A multimodal reasoning agent for query-based ROI navigation on whole-slide images

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21902v1
• Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2025 20:44:17 GMT
• Title: PathReasoning: A multimodal reasoning agent for query-based ROI navigation on whole-slide images
• Authors: Kunpeng Zhang, Hanwen Xu, Sheng Wang,
• Abstract summary: We propose "PathReasoning", a multi-modal reasoning agent that iteratively navigates across Whole Slide Images (WSIs)<n>PathReasoning builds a reasoning chain that gradually directs attention to diagnostically relevant areas.<n>It can substantially outperform strong ROI-selection approaches by 6.7% and 3.1% of AUROC on subtyping and longitudinal analysis tasks.
• Score: 12.145046046646215
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Deciphering tumor microenvironment from Whole Slide Images (WSIs) is intriguing as it is key to cancer diagnosis, prognosis and treatment response. While these gigapixel images on one hand offer a comprehensive portrait of cancer, on the other hand, the extremely large size, as much as more than 10 billion pixels, make it challenging and time-consuming to navigate to corresponding regions to support diverse clinical inspection. Inspired by pathologists who conducted navigation on WSIs with a combination of sampling, reasoning and self-reflection, we proposed "PathReasoning", a multi-modal reasoning agent that iteratively navigates across WSIs through multiple rounds of reasoning and refinements. Specifically, starting with randomly sampled candidate regions, PathReasoning reviews current selections with self-reflection, reasoning over the correspondence between visual observations and clinical questions, and concludes by proposing new regions to explore. Across rounds, PathReasoning builds a reasoning chain that gradually directs attention to diagnostically relevant areas. PathReasoning turns each whole slide into a sequence of question-guided views, allowing the model to efficiently find informative ROIs within a fixed number of steps, without the need for dense pixel-level annotations. PathReasoning can substantially outperform strong ROI-selection approaches by 6.7% and 3.1% of AUROC on subtyping and longitudinal analysis tasks. The high-quality ROIs further support accurate report generation on breast cancer, significantly outperforming the standard GPT-4o by 10% in accuracy. PathReasoning prioritizes question-specific regions and constructs interpretable reasoning chains, supporting efficient slide review, consistent diagnostic interpretations, comprehensive reporting, and evidence traceability in digital pathology.

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