Advancing healthcare through multimodal data fusion: a comprehensive review of techniques and applications

With the increasing availability of diverse healthcare data sources, such as medical images and electronic health records, there is a growing need to effectively integrate and fuse this multimodal data for comprehensive analysis and decision-making. However, despite its potential, multimodal data fusion in healthcare remains limited. This review paper provides an overview of existing literature on multimodal data fusion in healthcare, covering 69 relevant works published between 2018 and 2024. It focuses on methodologies that integrate different data types to enhance medical analysis, including techniques for integrating medical images with structured and unstructured data, combining multiple image modalities, and other features. Additionally, the paper reviews various approaches to multimodal data fusion, such as early, intermediate, and late fusion methods, and examines the challenges and limitations associated with these techniques. The potential benefits and applications of multimodal data fusion in various diseases are highlighted, illustrating specific strategies employed in healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) model development. This research synthesizes existing information to facilitate progress in using multimodal data for improved medical diagnosis and treatment planning.