Experience-Guided Self-Adaptive Cascaded Agents for Breast Cancer Screening and Diagnosis with Reduced Biopsy Referrals

TL;DR

This paper introduces BUSD-Agent, a two-stage, experience-guided multi-agent system for breast ultrasound screening that reduces unnecessary biopsies and diagnostic escalation by leveraging past case data for adaptive decision-making.

Contribution

It presents a novel experience-guided cascaded multi-agent framework that dynamically adapts decision thresholds based on past case trajectories without retraining models.

Findings

Reduced biopsy referrals from 59.50% to 37.08%.

Lowered diagnostic escalation from 84.95% to 58.72%.

Improved screening specificity by 68.48%.

Abstract

We propose an experience-guided cascaded multi-agent framework for Breast Ultrasound Screening and Diagnosis, called BUSD-Agent, that aims to reduce diagnostic escalation and unnecessary biopsy referrals. Our framework models screening and diagnosis as a two-stage, selective decision-making process. A lightweight `screening clinic' agent, restricted to classification models as tools, selectively filters out benign and normal cases from further diagnostic escalation when malignancy risk and uncertainty are estimated as low. Cases that have higher risks are escalated to the `diagnostic clinic' agent, which integrates richer perception and radiological description tools to make a secondary decision on biopsy referral. To improve agent performance, past records of pathology-confirmed outcomes along with image embeddings, model predictions, and historical agent actions are stored in a memory bank as structured decision trajectories. For each new case, BUSD-Agent retrieves similar past cases based on image, model response and confidence similarity to condition the agent's current decision policy. This enables retrieval-conditioned in-context adaptation that dynamically adjusts model trust and escalation thresholds from prior experiences without parameter updates. Evaluation across 10 breast ultrasound datasets shows that the proposed experience-guided workflow reduces diagnostic escalation in BUSD-Agent from 84.95% to 58.72% and overall biopsy referrals from 59.50% to 37.08%, compared to the same architecture without trajectory conditioning, while improving average screening specificity by 68.48% and diagnostic specificity by 6.33%.