Diagnostic Report Generation via a ProActive Multimodal Agentic System
Automated diagnostic report generation lies at the core of clinical diagnosis and can alleviate clinician shortages. Existing diagnostic report generation methods have two major limitations: they rely on unimodal inputs (e.g., images), ignoring textual biomarkers like medical history, and lack proactive dialogue capabilities to elicit personalized clinical information. To address those issues, we propose a ProActive Multimodal Agentic (PAMA) system, which performs comprehensive disease analysis by examining biomarkers in diverse sources, including multi-view medical images, medical histories, and diagnostic conversations. Built upon a knowledge graph and recommendation-based dialogue architecture, PAMA actively initiates adaptive, multi-turn conversations with patients, which is integrated with visual data for robust and reliable report generation. Specifically, PAMA actively generates adaptive multi-turn questions to collect clinically relevant background information, and then fuses the resulting dialogue context with visual representations for robust diagnostic report generation. We validate our approach on two real-world benchmark datasets, MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray, through extensive quantitative evaluations and comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we conduct user studies to assess the realism and clinical quality of the generated reports. Finally, we present real-world case studies to examine the performance of our system across diverse scenarios, demonstrating its robustness on scalability, complexity, and data variability.
Authors
- Garrison Allen
- Yu Gan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3409-3412)
- Ziyi Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6985-0298)
- Yuxiang Zhou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3462-2305)
- Xueshen Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6440-7462)
- Xinlong Hou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1116-817X)
- Sandra Guirguis
Institutions
- Stevens Institute of Technology (US)
- WinnMed (US)
- Mayo Clinic in Florida (US)
- Hackensack Meridian Health (US)
- Arizona State University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
- Published
- 2026-07-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3833391
- Primary Topic
- Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00