HistoPilot

HistoPilot is an AI-guided navigation and collaborative review project for whole-slide images (WSI). It combines PathTogether's slides, viewer, permissions and collaboration with HistoPilot's agent, visual-context and AI-observation capabilities as one product that users can understand and use directly.

One HistoPilot, three cooperating layers

Users should not have to understand three separate repositories first:

• PathTogether is the user-facing host and the main GitHub repository. It owns WSIs, projects, the viewer, annotations, comments, sharing, permissions and audit history;
• The HistoPilot service and plugin handle natural-language tasks, low-magnification overview, region navigation, zoom confirmation, snapshot observation, sessions, SSE, context compaction and AI annotation drafts;
• HistoPilot-DSH is an optional DeepSeek Harness adapter. It connects DSH conversation and orchestration to HistoPilot; it does not create a second navigation agent.

Product homepage: histopilot.com

Main GitHub repository: PathTogether

Development goals

HistoPilot is not intended to replace a pathologist, build a complex SaaS product or manage patients. Its goal is to turn a review into a traceable, reviewable and collaborative observation chain:

1. Turn natural language into review actions: start with an overview, locate a target, zoom in step by step, capture snapshots and observations, and draft annotations when useful;
2. Make the AI's visual context explainable: preserve coordinates, magnification, channels, image context and provenance so the image the user sees cannot silently differ from the image the AI receives;
3. Make long runs recoverable: support sessions, SSE reconnection, continuation, follow-up questions, branches, cancellation, context compaction and visual budgets while retaining replayable evidence;
4. Keep platform boundaries explicit: PathTogether owns data and permissions, HistoPilot owns AI runtime state, and the two communicate through a versioned plugin contract without exposing long-lived service credentials to the browser;
5. Keep a human in the loop: AI output is an observation or annotation draft; canonical collaboration data returns to PathTogether for acceptance, editing or rejection.

Current progress

Working today

• HistoPilot has an independent service and installable PathTogether UI bundle, with its own versioning and session data directory;
• The core agent and navigation paths exist: goto, zoom, snapshot, annotation, continue, ask, branch and cancel;
• SSE progress, reconnection, history recovery, context compaction, visual budgets and derived-image caching are part of the runtime path;
• The plugin works with the viewer through HostBridge and obtains authorized capabilities through the versioned Plugin Contract. HistoPilot does not directly read the PathTogether database, WSI paths or viewer globals;
• PathTogether remains usable for manual viewing, annotation, comments and sharing when HistoPilot is stopped or not installed.

Being refined

• Multicolor-fluorescence channel semantics, pseudocolor, intensity windows, coordinates and T/Z state must remain consistent with HistoPilot render context, caches and checkpoints;
• Whole-slide overview, actual read level, aspect ratio and high-magnification evidence are still being tightened so logical magnification is not presented as a physical read fact;
• Session isolation, branch and path replay, frozen attachments and cross-repository contracts are still being completed;
• The visual working set, encoding fingerprints, cache generations and context compaction are being turned from experiments into stable product contracts.

Next stage

• Gradually move from the legacy compatibility gateway to a general Plugin BFF while keeping older clients recoverable;
• Complete independent install, upgrade, disable and rollback flows so a plugin failure cannot take down PathTogether;
• Make cross-repository tests, real-browser acceptance and release checks part of stable gates;
• Expand format, channel and large-file ingestion compatibility while clearly marking uncalibrated or unverified capabilities as experimental or pending confirmation.

How one run ends

User task
  └─ PathTogether / HistoPilot plugin panel
       └─ HistoPilot session / agent
            ├─ reads authorized slides and regions
            ├─ navigates, observes and records evidence with a vision model
            └─ writes an AI annotation draft back to PathTogether
                         └─ human reviews, accepts or rejects

Technical details: plugin architecture and security boundary · HistoPilot-DSH adapter.

HistoPilot remains early-stage research software and is not for clinical diagnosis.