# OncoTriad-QA: A Patient-Level Radiology-Pathology-Genomics Benchmark for Pan-Cancer Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02615/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 11 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17161/) (2025)
- [MedGemma Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05201/) (2025)
- [HuatuoGPT-Vision, Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19280/) (2024)
- [Generalist Foundation Models from a Multimodal Dataset for 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17834/) (2024)
- [A Vision-Language Foundation Model to Enhance Efficiency of Chest X-ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12208/) (2024)
- [Molecular-driven Foundation Model for Oncologic Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16652/) (2025)
- [Medical SAM3: A Foundation Model for Universal Prompt-Driven Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10880/) (2026)
- [MM-NeuroOnco: A Multimodal Benchmark and Instruction Dataset for MRI-Based Brain Tumor Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22955/) (2026)
- [CoRe-BT: A Multimodal Radiology-Pathology-Text Benchmark for Robust Brain Tumor Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03618/) (2026)
- [TumorChain: Interleaved Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Traceable Clinical Tumor Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05867/) (2026)
- [Handling and Interpreting Missing Modalities in Patient Clinical Trajectories via Autoregressive Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18753/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cancer diagnosis and characterization require integrating complementary evidence from radiology, pathology, genomics, and clinical metadata. However, most medical large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks focus on isolated modalities or narrow image-text tasks, leaving patient-level oncology assessment across multiple evidence streams largely untested. We introduce OncoTriad-QA, a patient-level radiology-pathology-genomics benchmark for pan-cancer question answering. OncoTriad-QA contains 86.1k semantic questions across 9,281 TCGA patient cases from 32 cancer cohorts, aligning CT/MRI radiology, whole-slide histopathology, somatic mutations, copy-number alterations, DNA methylation, bulk RNA-seq, and clinical metadata. Case-specific annotations are constructed through a source-grounded LLM-assisted pipeline using curated labels, diagnostic reports, molecular profiles, and modality-derived evidence as primary sources of truth, with automated consistency checks and clinician review. We also introduce OncoVLM, a reference multimodal model that maps modality-native radiology, pathology, DNA methylation, and RNA-seq evidence into an LLM interface through learned projectors. Experiments show that existing general-purpose and medical LLMs remain limited on comprehensive pan-cancer QA, especially when questions require integrating imaging findings, tumor morphology, and molecular evidence. After fine-tuning on OncoTriad-QA, OncoVLM exceeds MedGemma-4B by an average of 10.7 points when using MCQ accuracy and BERTScore-F1, with consistent gains across multiple-choice and open-ended questions under radiology-only, pathology-only, and all-available settings. These results demonstrate the benchmark's value for training and evaluating models for integrated cancer question answering.
