Medicine

SlideBank: A Persistent Hierarchical Evidence Bank for Consistent Whole-Slide Reasoning

Beidi Zhao, Gexin Huang

Featured September 9, 2026

AI-generated analysis — This is SciGrove's AI interpretation of the paper, not peer-reviewed content. Always refer to the original paper.

Simply

A smart system looks at a giant tissue scan once, highlights all the important bits like 'fast-growing cells,' and saves these findings in an organized notebook to quickly answer any future questions about that slide.

In depth

SlideBank addresses the challenge of reasoning over gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs) by creating a persistent, structured evidence bank. Instead of re-scanning the entire WSI for every question, an agent performs a one-time, coarse-to-fine exploration to extract multi-scale morphological observations. These observations are then organized into a hierarchy, linked to specific pathology signals and WSI locations, allowing efficient and consistent retrieval for diverse downstream questions.

Key Takeaways

1
Introduces SlideBank, a novel training-free framework that transforms gigapixel WSIs into a persistent, concept-indexed, and spatially grounded hierarchical evidence bank for efficient and consistent reasoning.
2
Employs an agent-driven coarse-to-fine exploration strategy to populate the evidence bank with multi-scale morphological observations and pathology signals, which are then grounded to WSI coordinates.
3
Demonstrates improved accuracy, high rephrasing consistency, and substantial amortized inference cost reduction by reusing the pre-built evidence bank across multiple queries, outperforming existing methods.

Conceptual Flow

HIGH LEVEL

Building and Using the SlideBank

The system first explores a giant image to find important spots and describe them, then saves these descriptions in an organized notebook to answer questions quickly later.

Giant Image

Explore & Describe

Organized Notebook

Faster, More Reliable Answers

By using the organized notebook, the system answers questions about the giant images much faster and gives very similar answers even if the question is rephrased.

Question

Organized Notebook

Find Answer

Quick Answer

Consistent Answer

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