MedAgent-Pro: Towards Evidence-based Multi-modal Medical Diagnosis via Reasoning Agentic Workflow (2503.18968v3)

Abstract: In modern medicine, clinical diagnosis relies on the comprehensive analysis of primarily textual and visual data, drawing on medical expertise to ensure systematic and rigorous reasoning. Recent advances in large Vision-LLMs (VLMs) and agent-based methods hold great potential for medical diagnosis, thanks to the ability to effectively integrate multi-modal patient data. However, they often provide direct answers and draw empirical-driven conclusions without quantitative analysis, which reduces their reliability and clinical usability. We propose MedAgent-Pro, a new agentic reasoning paradigm that follows the diagnosis principle in modern medicine, to decouple the process into sequential components for step-by-step, evidence-based reasoning. Our MedAgent-Pro workflow presents a hierarchical diagnostic structure to mirror this principle, consisting of disease-level standardized plan generation and patient-level personalized step-by-step reasoning. To support disease-level planning, an RAG-based agent is designed to retrieve medical guidelines to ensure alignment with clinical standards. For patient-level reasoning, we propose to integrate professional tools such as visual models to enable quantitative assessments. Meanwhile, we propose to verify the reliability of each step to achieve evidence-based diagnosis, enforcing rigorous logical reasoning and a well-founded conclusion. Extensive experiments across a wide range of anatomical regions, imaging modalities, and diseases demonstrate the superiority of MedAgent-Pro to mainstream VLMs, agentic systems and state-of-the-art expert models. Ablation studies and human evaluation by clinical experts further validate its robustness and clinical relevance. Code is available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/MedAgent-Pro.