Pathology-CoT: Learning Visual Chain-of-Thought Agent from Expert Whole
  Slide Image Diagnosis Behavior
Authors: name: Sheng Wang; name: Ruiming Wu; name: Charles Herndon; name: Yihang Liu; name: Shunsuke Koga; name: Jeanne Shen; name: Zhi Huang
Published: 2025-10-06 08:44:04

Abstract: Diagnosing a whole-slide image is an interactive, multi-stage process
involving changes in magnification and movement between fields. Although recent
pathology foundation models are strong, practical agentic systems that decide
what field to examine next, adjust magnification, and deliver explainable
diagnoses are still lacking. The blocker is data: scalable, clinically aligned
supervision of expert viewing behavior that is tacit and experience-based, not
written in textbooks or online, and therefore absent from large language model
training. We introduce the AI Session Recorder, which works with standard WSI
viewers to unobtrusively record routine navigation and convert the viewer logs
into standardized behavioral commands (inspect or peek at discrete
magnifications) and bounding boxes. A lightweight human-in-the-loop review
turns AI-drafted rationales into the Pathology-CoT dataset, a form of paired
"where to look" and "why it matters" supervision produced at roughly six times
lower labeling time. Using this behavioral data, we build Pathologist-o3, a
two-stage agent that first proposes regions of interest and then performs
behavior-guided reasoning. On gastrointestinal lymph-node metastasis detection,
it achieved 84.5% precision, 100.0% recall, and 75.4% accuracy, exceeding the
state-of-the-art OpenAI o3 model and generalizing across backbones. To our
knowledge, this constitutes one of the first behavior-grounded agentic systems
in pathology. Turning everyday viewer logs into scalable, expert-validated
supervision, our framework makes agentic pathology practical and establishes a
path to human-aligned, upgradeable clinical AI.