Challenges and proposed solutions in modeling multimodal data: A systematic review
It addresses obstacles in integrating diverse medical data types to improve diagnostic accuracy and personalized care, though it is an incremental review synthesizing existing findings.
This systematic review analyzed 69 studies to identify key technical challenges in modeling multimodal clinical data, such as missing modalities and dimensionality imbalance, and highlighted recent methodological advances like transfer learning and attention mechanisms as promising solutions.
Multimodal data modeling has emerged as a powerful approach in clinical research, enabling the integration of diverse data types such as imaging, genomics, wearable sensors, and electronic health records. Despite its potential to improve diagnostic accuracy and support personalized care, modeling such heterogeneous data presents significant technical challenges. This systematic review synthesizes findings from 69 studies to identify common obstacles, including missing modalities, limited sample sizes, dimensionality imbalance, interpretability issues, and finding the optimal fusion techniques. We highlight recent methodological advances, such as transfer learning, generative models, attention mechanisms, and neural architecture search that offer promising solutions. By mapping current trends and innovations, this review provides a comprehensive overview of the field and offers practical insights to guide future research and development in multimodal modeling for medical applications.