Physics-informed neural networks for physiological signal processing and modeling: a narrative review

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) represent a transformative approach to data models by incorporating known physical laws into neural network training, thereby improving model generalizability, reduce data dependency, and enhance interpretability. Like many other fields in engineering and science, the analysis of physiological signals has been influenced by PINNs in recent years. This manuscript provides a comprehensive overview of PINNs from various perspectives in the physiological signal analysis domain. After exploring the literature and screening the search results, more than 40 key studies in the related domain are selected and categorized based on both practically and theoretically significant perspectives, including input data types, applications, physics-informed models, and neural network architectures. While the advantages of PINNs in tackling forward and inverse problems in physiological signal contexts are highlighted, challenges such as noisy inputs, computational complexity, loss function types, and overall model configuration are discussed, providing insights into future research directions and improvements. This work can serve as a guiding resource for researchers exploring PINNs in biomedical and physiological signal processing, paving the way for more precise, data-efficient, and clinically relevant solutions.