Deep Learning in Hematology: From Molecules to Patients

Deep learning (DL), a subfield of machine learning, has made remarkable strides across various aspects of medicine. This review examines DL's applications in hematology, spanning from molecular insights to patient care. The review begins by providing a straightforward introduction to the basics of DL tailored for those without prior knowledge, touching on essential concepts, principal architectures, and prevalent training methods. It then discusses the applications of DL in hematology, concentrating on elucidating the models' architecture, their applications, performance metrics, and inherent limitations. For example, at the molecular level, DL has improved the analysis of multi-omics data and protein structure prediction. For cells and tissues, DL enables the automation of cytomorphology analysis, interpretation of flow cytometry data, and diagnosis from whole slide images. At the patient level, DL's utility extends to analyzing curated clinical data, electronic health records, and clinical notes through large language models. While DL has shown promising results in various hematology applications, challenges remain in model generalizability and explainability. Moreover, the integration of novel DL architectures into hematology has been relatively slow in comparison to that in other medical fields.