Cherise
Abstract:Intensive care units (ICU) generate long, dense and evolving streams of clinical information, where physicians must repeatedly reassess patient states under time pressure, underscoring a clear need for reliable AI decision support. Existing ICU benchmarks typically treat historical clinician actions as ground truth. However, these actions are made under incomplete information and limited temporal context of the underlying patient state, and may therefore be suboptimal, making it difficult to assess the true reasoning capabilities of AI systems. We introduce RealICU, a hindsight-annotated benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) under realistic ICU conditions, where labels are created after senior physicians review the full patient trajectory. We formulate four physician-motivated tasks: assess Patient Status, Acute Problems, Recommended Actions, and Red Flag actions that risk unsafe outcomes. We partition each trajectory with 30-min windows and release two datasets: RealICU-Gold with 930-window annotations from 94 MIMIC-IV patients, and RealICU-Scale with 11,862 windows extended by Oracle, a physician-validated LLM hindsight labeler. Existing LLMs including memory-augmented ones performed poorly on RealICU, exposing two failure modes: a recall-safety tradeoff for clinical recommendations, and an anchoring bias to early interpretations of the patient. We further introduce ICU-Evo to study structured-memory agents that improves long-horizon reasoning but does not fully eliminate safety failures. Together, RealICU provides a clinically grounded testbed for measuring and improving AI sequential decision-support in high-stakes care. Project page: https://chengzhi-leo.github.io/RealICU-Bench/
Abstract:Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents can orchestrate specialist classifiers, segmentation models, and visual question-answering modules to interpret chest X-rays. However, these agents still solve each case in isolation: they fail to accumulate experience across cases, correct recurrent reasoning mistakes, or adapt their tool-use behavior without expensive reinforcement learning. While a radiologist naturally improves with every case, current agents remain static. In this work, we propose Evo-MedAgent, a self-evolving memory module that equips a medical agent with the capacity for inter-case learning at test time. Our memory comprises three complementary stores: (1)~\emph{Retrospective Clinical Episodes} that retrieve problem-solving experiences from similar past cases, (2)~an \emph{Adaptive Procedural Heuristics} bank curating priority-tagged diagnostic rules that evolves via reflection, much like a physician refining their internal criteria, and (3)~a \emph{Tool Reliability Controller} that tracks per-tool trustworthiness. On ChestAgentBench, Evo-MedAgent raises multiple-choice question (MCQ) accuracy from 0.68 to 0.79 on GPT-5-mini, and from 0.76 to 0.87 on Gemini-3 Flash. With a strong base model, evolving memory improves performance more effectively than orchestrating external tools on qualitative diagnostic tasks. Because Evo-MedAgent requires no training, its per-case overhead is bounded by one additional retrieval pass and a single reflection call, making it deployable on top of any frozen model.
Abstract:Currently, evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in medical imaging tasks oversimplifies clinical reality by relying on pre-selected 2D images that demand significant manual labor to curate. This setup misses the core challenge of realworld diagnostics: a true clinical agent must actively navigate full 3D volumes across multiple sequences or modalities to gather evidence and ultimately support a final decision. To address this, we propose MEDOPENCLAW, an auditable runtime designed to let VLMs operate dynamically within standard medical tools or viewers (e.g., 3D Slicer). On top of this runtime, we introduce MEDFLOWBENCH, a full-study medical imaging benchmark covering multi-sequence brain MRI and lung CT/PET. It systematically evaluates medical agentic capabilities across viewer-only, tool-use, and open-method tracks. Initial results reveal a critical insight: while state-of-the-art LLMs/VLMs (e.g., Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.4) can successfully navigate the viewer to solve basic study-level tasks, their performance paradoxically degrades when given access to professional support tools due to a lack of precise spatial grounding. By bridging the gap between static-image perception and interactive clinical workflows, MEDOPENCLAW and MEDFLOWBENCH establish a reproducible foundation for developing auditable, full-study medical imaging agents.