mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Survey of LLM-based Agents in Medicine: How far are we from Baymax?

arXiv 2502.11211 ↗First posted 16 Feb 2025cs.CL cs.AI cs.CVcited by 84

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Medical and scientific domain agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming healthcare through the development of LLM-based agents that can understand, reason about, and assist with medical tasks. This survey provides a comprehensive review of LLM-based agents in medicine, examining their architectures, applications, and challenges. We analyze the key components of medical agent systems, including system profiles, clinical planning mechanisms, medical reasoning frameworks, and external capacity enhancement. The survey covers major application scenarios such as clinical decision support, medical documentation, training simulations, and healthcare service optimization. We discuss evaluation frameworks and metrics used to assess these agents' performance in healthcare settings. While LLM-based agents show promise in enhancing healthcare delivery, several challenges remain, including hallucination management, multimodal integration, implementation barriers, and ethical considerations. The survey concludes by highlighting future research directions, including advances in medical reasoning inspired by recent developments in LLM architectures, integration with physical systems, and improvements in training simulations. This work provides researchers and practitioners with a structured overview of the current state and future prospects of LLM-based agents in medicine.

Key facts. Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical and scientific domain agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 38 of its 83 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2025.

Builds on

38 of 83 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution16 Dec
  2. 2024SurgBox: Agent-Driven Operating Room Sandbox with Surgery Copilot6 Dec
  3. 2024Towards Next-Generation Medical Agent: How o1 is Reshaping Decision-Making in Medical Scenarios16 Nov
  4. 2024MeNTi: Bridging Medical Calculator and LLM Agent with Nested Tool Calling17 Oct
  5. 2024Adaptive Reasoning and Acting in Medical Language Agents13 Oct
  6. 2024MAGDA: Multi-agent guideline-driven diagnostic assistance10 Sep
  7. 2024Rx Strategist: Prescription Verification using LLM Agents System5 Sep
  8. 2024MEDCO: Medical Education Copilots Based on A Multi-Agent Framework22 Aug
  9. 2024Agentic LLM Workflows for Generating Patient-Friendly Medical Reports2 Aug
  10. 2024MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent2 Jul
  11. 2024AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environments13 May
  12. 2024Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents5 May
1 more
  1. 2024AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator15 Feb

Other references · 25

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  3. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  4. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
  5. 2020Extracting Training Data from Large Language Modelscited by 2,144
  6. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
  7. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,324
  8. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,271
  9. 2020Aligning AI With Shared Human Valuescited by 706
  10. 2023ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry toolscited by 609
  11. 2023MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoningcited by 311
  12. 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agentscited by 268
13 more
  1. 2023Does Synthetic Data Generation of LLMs Help Clinical Text Mining?cited by 151
  2. 2018Lessons from Natural Language Inference in the Clinical Domaincited by 149
  3. 2024Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospectscited by 130
  4. 2024Large Language Models for Medicine: A Surveycited by 38
  5. 2024Addressing cognitive bias in medical language modelscited by 34
  6. 2025O1 Replication Journey -- Part 3: Inference-time Scaling for Medical Reasoningcited by 34
  7. 2024Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolutioncited by 29
  8. 2024ClinicalLab: Aligning Agents for Multi-Departmental Clinical Diagnostics in the Real Worldcited by 28
  9. 2024Polaris: A Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcarecited by 27
  10. 2023Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Datacited by 26
  11. 2024Towards Automatic Evaluation for LLMs' Clinical Capabilities: Metric, Data, and Algorithmcited by 14
  12. 2024Benchmarking Large Language Models on Communicative Medical Coaching: a Novel System and Datasetcited by 2
  13. 2024Exploring LLM-based Data Annotation Strategies for Medical Dialogue Preference Alignmentcited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 40; 2026: 44.

84 papers.

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  1. 2025DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research Agentscited by 236
  2. 2025From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 146
  3. 2025From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discoverycited by 74
  4. 2025TRiSM for Agentic AI: A Review of Trust, Risk, and Security Management in LLM-based Agentic Multi-Agent Systemscited by 58
  5. 2025Baichuan-M2: Scaling Medical Capability with Large Verifier Systemcited by 55
  6. 2025SAGA: A Security Architecture for Governing AI Agentic Systemscited by 45
  7. 2025Generative to Agentic AI: Survey, Conceptualization, and Challengescited by 32
  8. 2025LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Surveycited by 28
  9. 2025LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industrycited by 22
  10. 2025MedAgentGym: A Scalable Agentic Training Environment for Code-Centric Reasoning in Biomedical Data Sciencecited by 22
  11. 2025CT-Agent: A Multimodal-LLM Agent for 3D CT Radiology Question Answeringcited by 20
  12. 2026Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents: Foundations, Emerging Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 15
38 more
  1. 2025A Vision for Access Control in LLM-based Agent Systemscited by 14
  2. 2025EndoBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Endoscopy Analysiscited by 13
  3. 2026Agent-Sentry: Bounding LLM Agents via Execution Provenancecited by 13
  4. 2025Policy-as-Prompt: Turning AI Governance Rules into Guardrails for AI Agentscited by 12
  5. 2025Doctor-R1: Mastering Clinical Inquiry with Experiential Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 11
  6. 2026Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agentscited by 11
  7. 2026Toward Personalized LLM-Powered Agents: Foundations, Evaluation, and Future Directionscited by 10
  8. 2025AUTOCT: Automating Interpretable Clinical Trial Prediction with LLM Agentscited by 9
  9. 2025A Call for Collaborative Intelligence: Why Human-Agent Systems Should Precede AI Autonomycited by 9
  10. 2025MedSentry: Understanding and Mitigating Safety Risks in Medical LLM Multi-Agent Systemscited by 8
  11. 2025H2R: Hierarchical Hindsight Reflection for Multi-Task LLM Agentscited by 8
  12. 2025Backdoor Attribution: Elucidating and Controlling Backdoor in Language Modelscited by 8
  13. 2025Prompt-R1: Collaborative Automatic Prompting Framework via End-to-end Reinforcement Learningcited by 7
  14. 2025MTBBench: A Multimodal Sequential Clinical Decision-Making Benchmark in Oncologycited by 6
  15. 2025Embracing Trustworthy Brain-Agent Collaboration as Paradigm Extension for Intelligent Assistive Technologiescited by 5
  16. 2026Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning-Based LLM Reasoning: Design, Challenges, and Evaluationcited by 5
  17. 2025CCD: Mitigating Hallucinations in Radiology MLLMs via Clinical Contrastive Decodingcited by 4
  18. 2026OpenSage: Self-programming Agent Generation Enginecited by 4
  19. 2026When Correct Beliefs Collapse: Epistemic Resilience of LLMs under Clinical Pressurecited by 4
  20. 2026PrivacyPeek: Auditing What LLM-Based Agents Acquire, Not Just What They Saycited by 4
  21. 2026PORTS: Preference-Optimized Retrievers for Tool Selection with Large Language Modelscited by 4
  22. 2025Do LLMs Recognize Your Latent Preferences? A Benchmark for Latent Information Discovery in Personalized Interactioncited by 3
  23. 2025Generative AI for Healthcare: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Perspectivescited by 3
  24. 2025BioVerge: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Study of Self-Evaluating Agents for Biomedical Hypothesis Generationcited by 3
  25. 2025LexGenius: An Expert-Level Benchmark for Large Language Models in Legal General Intelligencecited by 3
  26. 2026From Biased Chatbots to Biased Agents: Examining Role Assignment Effects on LLM Agent Robustnesscited by 3
  27. 2026GraphFlow: A Graph-Based Workflow Management for Efficient LLM-Agent Servingcited by 3
  28. 2025Enhancing Clinical Decision-Making: Integrating Multi-Agent Systems with Ethical AI Governancecited by 2
  29. 2025OpenLens AI: Fully Autonomous Research Agent for Health Infomaticscited by 2
  30. 2025Safety Compliance: Rethinking LLM Safety Reasoning through the Lens of Compliancecited by 2
  31. 2025Traj-CoA: Patient Trajectory Modeling via Chain-of-Agents for Lung Cancer Risk Predictioncited by 2
  32. 2025Empowering Real-World: A Survey on the Technology, Practice, and Evaluation of LLM-driven Industry Agentscited by 2
  33. 2026EDCO: Dynamic Curriculum Orchestration for Domain-specific Large Language Model Fine-tuningcited by 2
  34. 2026Picking the Right Specialist: Attentive Neural Process-based Selection of Task-Specialized Models as Tools for Agentic Healthcare Systemscited by 2
  35. 2026When OpenClaw Meets Hospital: Toward an Agentic Operating System for Dynamic Clinical Workflowscited by 2
  36. 2026AD-CARE: A Guideline-grounded, Modality-agnostic LLM Agent for Real-world Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis with Multi-cohort Assessment, Fairness Analysis, and Reader Studycited by 2
  37. 2026Social Dynamics as Critical Vulnerabilities that Undermine Objective Decision-Making in LLM Collectivescited by 2
  38. 2026REAL: A Reasoning-Enhanced Graph Framework for Long-Term Memory Management of LLMscited by 2

50 most cited of 84 All 84 (JSON)

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  1. 2023Large Language Models Illuminate a Progressive Pathway to Artificial Healthcare Assistant: A Review
  2. 2025Reasoning LLMs in the Medical Domain: A Literature Survey
  3. 2026Aligning Clinical Needs and AI Capabilities: A Survey on LLMs for Medical Reasoning
  4. 2025Medical Reasoning in the Era of LLMs: A Systematic Review of Enhancement Techniques and Applications
  5. 2024A Comprehensive Survey of Large Language Models and Multimodal Large Language Models in Medicine
  6. 2026AgentRx: A Benchmark Study of LLM Agents for Multimodal Clinical Prediction Tasks
  7. 2026LLM-as-a-Judge in Healthcare: A Scoping Analysis of Applications, Methods, and Human Alignment ↗
  8. 2025MedicalOS: An LLM Agent based Operating System for Digital Healthcare