Vision–language models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization on natural images and show early promise in interpretable medical image analysis. However, existing benchmarks do not systematically evaluate whether these models truly reason like human clinicians or merely imitate superficial patterns. To address this gap, we propose DrVD-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for clinical visual reasoning. DrVD-Bench consists of three modules: Visual Evidence Comprehension, Reasoning Trajectory Assessment, and Report Generation Evaluation, comprising a total of 7,789 image–question pairs. Our benchmark covers 20 task types, 17 diagnostic categories, and five imaging modalities—CT, MRI, ultrasound, radiography, and pathology. DrVD-Bench is explicitly structured to reflect the clinical reasoning workflow from modality recognition to lesion identification and diagnosis. We benchmark 19 VLMs, including general-purpose and medical-specific, open-source and proprietary models, and observe that performance drops sharply as reasoning complexity increases. While some models begin to exhibit traces of human-like reasoning, they often still rely on shortcut correlations rather than grounded visual understanding. DrVD-Bench offers a rigorous and structured evaluation framework to guide the development of clinically trustworthy VLMs.

SUMMARY: In single-cell transcriptomics, inconsistent cell type annotations due to varied naming conventions and hierarchical granularity impede data integration, machine learning applications, and meaningful evaluations. To address this challenge, we developed the unified Hierarchical Annotation Framework (uHAF), which includes organ-specific hierarchical cell type trees (uHAF-T) and a mapping tool (uHAF-Agent) based on large language models. uHAF-T provides standardized hierarchical references for 38 organs, allowing for consistent label unification and analysis at different levels of granularity. uHAF-Agent leverages GPT-4 to accurately map diverse and informal cell type labels onto uHAF-T nodes, streamlining the harmonization process. By simplifying label unification, uHAF enhances data integration, supports machine learning applications, and enables biologically meaningful evaluations of annotation methods. Our framework serves as an essential resource for standardizing cell type annotations and fostering collaborative refinement in the single-cell research community. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: uHAF is publicly available at: https://uhaf.unifiedcellatlas.org and https://github.com/SuperBianC/uhaf.