Challenges in AI-driven Biomedical Multimodal Data Fusion and Analysis

The rapid development of biological and medical examination methods has vastly expanded personal biomedical information, including molecular, cellular, image, and electronic health record datasets. Integrating this wealth of information enables precise disease diagnosis, biomarker identification, and treatment design in clinical settings. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly deep learning models, have been extensively employed in biomedical applications, demonstrating increased precision, efficiency, and generalization. The success of the large language and vision models further significantly extends their biomedical applications. However, challenges remain in learning these multimodal biomedical datasets, such as data privacy, fusion, and model interpretation. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of various biomedical data modalities, multimodal representation learning methods, and the applications of AI in biomedical data integrative analysis. Additionally, we discuss the challenges in applying these deep learning methods and how to better integrate them into biomedical scenarios. We then propose future directions for adapting deep learning methods with model pretraining and knowledge integration to advance biomedical research and benefit their clinical applications.