Abstract
Whole slide images (WSIs) are vital in digital pathology, enabling gigapixel tissue analysis across various pathological tasks. While recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) allow multi-task WSI analysis through natural language, they often underperform compared to task-specific models. Collaborative multi-agent systems have emerged as a promising solution to balance versatility and accuracy in healthcare, yet their potential remains underexplored in pathology-specific domains. To address these issues, we propose WSI-Agents, a novel collaborative multi-agent system for multi-modal WSI analysis. WSI-Agents integrates specialized functional agents with robust task allocation and verification mechanisms to enhance both task-specific accuracy and multi-task versatility through three components: (1) a task allocation module assigning tasks to expert agents using a model zoo of patch and WSI level MLLMs, (2) a verification mechanism ensuring accuracy through internal consistency checks and external validation using pathology knowledge bases and domain-specific models, and (3) a summary module synthesizing the final summary with visual interpretation maps. Extensive experiments on multi-modal WSI benchmarks show WSI-Agents’s superiority to current WSI MLLMs and medical agent frameworks across diverse tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/CVI-SZU/WSI-Agents. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2025 |
| Subtitle of host publication | 28th International Conference, Daejeon, South Korea, September 23–27, 2025, Proceedings, Part V |
| Editors | James C. Gee, Daniel C. Alexander, Jaesung Hong, Juan Eugenio Iglesias, Carole H. Sudre, Archana Venkataraman, Polina Golland, Jong Hyo Kim, Jinah Park |
| Place of Publication | Cham |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Pages | 680-690 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-032-04971-1 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-032-04970-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2026 |
| Event | 28th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2025) - Daejeon Convention Center, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of Duration: 23 Sept 2025 → 27 Sept 2025 |
Publication series
| Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science |
|---|---|
| Volume | 15964 |
| ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
| ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
| Conference | 28th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2025) |
|---|---|
| Place | Korea, Republic of |
| City | Daejeon |
| Period | 23/09/25 → 27/09/25 |
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 82261138629 and 12326610), the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory (Grant 2023B1212060076), the Yongjiang Technology Innovation Project (Grant 2022A-097-G), the Zhejiang Department of Transportation General Research and Development Project (Grant 2024039), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China talent grant (UNNC: B0166).
Research Keywords
- Digital Pathology
- Multi-agent System
- Whole Slide Image
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