World's First Clinical-Grade Multimodal Oral Pathology Large Model Deployed at West China Stomatology

Background

Oral pathology diagnosis traditionally involves microscopic examination of tissue samples to identify a range of diseases, but it faces notable challenges. These include high volumes of specimens, complex disease subtypes, heavy dependence on individual specialist experience, and scarcity of expert resources in manygrassroots healthcare settings. Such factors can affect the consistency, speed, and accessibility of accurate diagnoses for conditions ranging from benign lesions to oral tumors.

What was achieved

The world's first clinical-grade multimodal oral pathology large model, HXDental-PathAI (also referred to as HX Dental-Path AI), has been deployed for clinical use in the pathology department of West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University. Reports of its implementation appeared on November 28, 2025. The model was jointly developed by the hospital's pathology department and Westlake University, integrating specialized oral pathology knowledge with advanced artificial intelligence techniques.

It supports interactive intelligent diagnosis covering more than 30 common oral diseases, including squamous cell carcinoma, leukoplakia, fibroma and cysts. For oral and maxillofacial tumorous lesions, the system can perform benign-malignant preliminary screening, localize cancerous regions, and conduct quantitative analysis within seconds. Clinical validation indicated 98% sensitivity and 97% specificity in differentiating benign from malignant lesions and suspicious lesions.

Sichuan University West China Hospital of Stomatology president Han Xianglong stated that, as the National Center for Oral Medicine, the hospital is committed to advancing the digital-intelligent transformation of stomatology. The model contributes to precision diagnostics, supports training for young physicians, and aids research by uncovering pathological and clinical correlations. It represents a shift toward a "human-machine co-intelligence" approach in oral pathology.

How it works

HXDental-PathAI incorporates a multimodal large language model as its foundation. It employs a multiple instance learning algorithm based on attention mechanisms to construct a network architecture with hundreds of billions of parameters. The system is developed by mining millions of high-quality pathological features together with clinical multimodal data. This architecture enables both high-precision interpretation of pathology images and professional-level natural language processing, allowing the model to bridge visual patterns with clinical context.

In clinical practice, pathologists can input or capture digital images of tissue samples. The AI rapidly analyzes these to identify characteristics associated with over 30 conditions, offering outputs for screening, localization, and measurement. In teaching scenarios, it features a "one-click image capture, image-text interactive questioning" capability. This function parses images and associated text in real time, links to typical cases and recent literature, and supports back-and-forth interaction to help build diagnostic reasoning for younger physicians.

What it means for international patients

West China Hospital of Stomatology maintains a special needs international medical department that provides dedicated services for overseas patients, including VIP facilities, bilingual Chinese-English support, and coordination for complex care. The deployment of an advanced AI pathology model such as HXDental-PathAI may contribute to enhanced diagnostic precision and efficiency for oral conditions treated at this specialized center.

International patients interested in care involving this technology should directly contact the hospital's international department to confirm current availability, eligibility criteria, and how the model might integrate into an individual diagnostic or treatment plan. Specific applicability depends on each patient's clinical presentation and must be assessed by the hospital's specialists.

About the hospital

West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, is located in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Its origins trace to the 1907 Chengdu Renji Dental Clinic. It developed into China's first higher dental college in 1917 and is recognized as the cradle of modern stomatology in China. The institution serves as the National Center for Stomatology, the National Clinical Research Center for Oral Diseases, and hosts the State Key Laboratory of Oral Diseases.

It has consistently ranked first in China for stomatology in domestic evaluations and placed fourth globally and first in China in the 2026 ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS) for the field. The hospital maintains multiple national key clinical specialties across oral medicine subdisciplines and is active in digital innovation, international training programs, and services for overseas patients through its international medical facilities.