PathXAI: Evidence-guided structured pathology reporting by transferable tissue segmentation

Zhaorui Tan, Jun Aun Tan, Weixiang Zhong, Xiaoxi Wang, Tan Pan +5

Pathology reporting requires translating tissue observations across regions and slides into specific diagnoses and supporting morphological descriptions. However, the use of explicit tissue-composition measurements to guide H&E-based report generation remains underexplored. Thus, we developed PathXAI, which combines segmentation-derived tissue information with H&E images and optional domain knowledge to guide diagnostic reasoning, targeted reinspection and structured report writing. Its segmentation component exceeded baselines in mean Dice on internal and external tests. In automated report evaluation on 1,200 public and 151 private cases, PathXAI achieved higher agreement with reference diagnoses and documented morphology than the H&E-based comparators. On the public evaluation cohort, PathXAI-Report exceeded Qwen + H&E in cancer family match rate by 4.4 percentage points and in finding F1 by 5.7 percentage points. PathXAI generates evidence-linked reports with a self-hosted pretrained vision-language model, without updating its weights.