RadAgents: Multimodal Agentic Reasoning for Chest X-ray Interpretation with Radiologist-like Workflows

Kai Zhang, Corey D Barrett, Jangwon Kim, Lichao Sun, Tara Taghavi, Krishnaram Kenthapadi

Keywords: Multi-agent system, multimodal reasoning, chest X-ray, image interpretation

Abstract: Agentic systems offer a potential path to solve complex clinical tasks through collaboration among specialized agents, augmented by tool use and external knowledge bases. Nevertheless, for chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation, prevailing methods remain limited: (i) reasoning is frequently neither clinically interpretable nor aligned with guidelines, reflecting mere aggregation of tool outputs; (ii) multimodal evidence is insufficiently fused, yielding text-only rationales that are not visually grounded; and (iii) systems rarely detect or resolve cross-tool inconsistencies and provide no principled verification mechanisms. To bridge the above gaps, we present RadAgents, a multi-agent framework that couples clinical priors with task-aware multimodal reasoning and encodes a radiologist-style workflow into a modular, auditable pipeline. In addition, we integrate grounding and multimodal retrieval-augmentation to verify and resolve context conflicts, resulting in outputs that are more reliable, transparent, and consistent with clinical practice.

Primary Subject Area: Application: Radiology

Secondary Subject Area: Safe and Trustworthy Learning-assisted Solutions for Medical Imaging

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Submission Number: 327