Echo-{\alpha}: Large Agentic Multimodal Reasoning Model for Ultrasound Interpretation

arXiv:2604.28011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultrasound interpretation requires both precise lesion localization and holistic clinical reasoning, yet existing methods typically excel at only one of these capabilities: specialized detectors offer strong localization but limited reasoning, whereas multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provide flexible reasoning but weak grounding in specialized medical domains. We present Echo-{\alpha}, an agentic multimodal reasoning model for ultrasound interpretation that unifies these strengths within an invoke-and-reason framework. Echo-{\alpha} is trained to coordinate organ-specific detector outputs, integrate them with global visual context, and convert the resulting evidence into grounded diagnostic decisions beyond detector-only inference. This behavior is established through a nine-task supervised curriculum and then refined by sequential reinforcement learning under different reward trade-offs, yielding Echo-{\alpha}-Grounding for lesion anchoring and Echo-{\alpha}-Diagnosis for final diagnosis. On multi-center renal and breast ultrasound benchmarks, Echo-{\alpha} outperforms competitive baselines on both grounding and diagnosis. In particular, on cross-center test sets, Echo-{\alpha}-Grounding attains 56.73%/43.78% F1@0.5 and Echo- {\alpha}-Diagnosis reaches 74.90%/49.20% overall accuracy on renal/breast ultrasound. These results suggest that agentic multimodal reasoning can turn specialized detectors into verifiable clinical evidence, offering a practical route toward ultrasound AI systems that are more accurate, interpretable, and transferable. The repository is at https://github.com/MiliLab/Echo-Alpha.