The Expanding Landscape of Neural Architectures and Their Impact in Biomedicine

Deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have seen explosive growth and success in biomedical applications in the last decade, largely due to the rapid development of deep neural networks and their underlying neural network (NN) architectures. Here, we explore biomedical deep learning and AI from the specific perspective of NN architectures. We discuss widely varying design principles of NN architectures, their use in particular biomedical applications, and the assumptions (often hidden) built into them. We explore neural architecture search techniques that automate the design of NN topology to optimize task performance. Advanced neural architectures are being developed for both molecular and healthcare applications, employing elements of graph networks, transformers, and interpretable NNs, and we discuss and summarize the design considerations and unique advantages of each architecture. Future advances will include the employment of multimodal language models and smaller highly focused mechanistic models that build on the success of today's large models.