MedAgentBoard: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Collaboration with Conventional Methods for Diverse Medical Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Yinghao, He, Ziyi, Hu, Haoran, Zheng, Xiaochen, Zhang, Xichen, Wang, Zixiang, Gao, Junyi, Ma, Liantao, Yu, Lequan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhu, Yinghao
He, Ziyi
Hu, Haoran
Zheng, Xiaochen
Zhang, Xichen
Wang, Zixiang
Gao, Junyi
Ma, Liantao
Yu, Lequan
author_facet Zhu, Yinghao
He, Ziyi
Hu, Haoran
Zheng, Xiaochen
Zhang, Xichen
Wang, Zixiang
Gao, Junyi
Ma, Liantao
Yu, Lequan
contents The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has stimulated interest in multi-agent collaboration for addressing complex medical tasks. However, the practical advantages of multi-agent collaboration approaches remain insufficiently understood. Existing evaluations often lack generalizability, failing to cover diverse tasks reflective of real-world clinical practice, and frequently omit rigorous comparisons against both single-LLM-based and established conventional methods. To address this critical gap, we introduce MedAgentBoard, a comprehensive benchmark for the systematic evaluation of multi-agent collaboration, single-LLM, and conventional approaches. MedAgentBoard encompasses four diverse medical task categories: (1) medical (visual) question answering, (2) lay summary generation, (3) structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) predictive modeling, and (4) clinical workflow automation, across text, medical images, and structured EHR data. Our extensive experiments reveal a nuanced landscape: while multi-agent collaboration demonstrates benefits in specific scenarios, such as enhancing task completeness in clinical workflow automation, it does not consistently outperform advanced single LLMs (e.g., in textual medical QA) or, critically, specialized conventional methods that generally maintain better performance in tasks like medical VQA and EHR-based prediction. MedAgentBoard offers a vital resource and actionable insights, emphasizing the necessity of a task-specific, evidence-based approach to selecting and developing AI solutions in medicine. It underscores that the inherent complexity and overhead of multi-agent collaboration must be carefully weighed against tangible performance gains. All code, datasets, detailed prompts, and experimental results are open-sourced at https://medagentboard.netlify.app/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MedAgentBoard: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Collaboration with Conventional Methods for Diverse Medical Tasks
Zhu, Yinghao
He, Ziyi
Hu, Haoran
Zheng, Xiaochen
Zhang, Xichen
Wang, Zixiang
Gao, Junyi
Ma, Liantao
Yu, Lequan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has stimulated interest in multi-agent collaboration for addressing complex medical tasks. However, the practical advantages of multi-agent collaboration approaches remain insufficiently understood. Existing evaluations often lack generalizability, failing to cover diverse tasks reflective of real-world clinical practice, and frequently omit rigorous comparisons against both single-LLM-based and established conventional methods. To address this critical gap, we introduce MedAgentBoard, a comprehensive benchmark for the systematic evaluation of multi-agent collaboration, single-LLM, and conventional approaches. MedAgentBoard encompasses four diverse medical task categories: (1) medical (visual) question answering, (2) lay summary generation, (3) structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) predictive modeling, and (4) clinical workflow automation, across text, medical images, and structured EHR data. Our extensive experiments reveal a nuanced landscape: while multi-agent collaboration demonstrates benefits in specific scenarios, such as enhancing task completeness in clinical workflow automation, it does not consistently outperform advanced single LLMs (e.g., in textual medical QA) or, critically, specialized conventional methods that generally maintain better performance in tasks like medical VQA and EHR-based prediction. MedAgentBoard offers a vital resource and actionable insights, emphasizing the necessity of a task-specific, evidence-based approach to selecting and developing AI solutions in medicine. It underscores that the inherent complexity and overhead of multi-agent collaboration must be carefully weighed against tangible performance gains. All code, datasets, detailed prompts, and experimental results are open-sourced at https://medagentboard.netlify.app/.
title MedAgentBoard: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Collaboration with Conventional Methods for Diverse Medical Tasks
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12371