Bridging modalities with AI: a review of AI advances in multimodal biomedical imaging
The rapid evolution of AI has facilitated innovative solutions in analysing different biomedical imaging modalities. By leveraging the complementary information from each modality, multimodal AI solutions have shown a huge potential to go beyond human capabilities and offer advances in bioimaging. At the same time, new foundation models and transformer-based architectures are now poised to address unsolved challenges in this field. This review aims to explore and discuss the state-of-the-art AI techniques applied in multimodal biomedical imaging, presenting the key challenges and future directions. We discuss several integration strategies to combine multiple biomedical imaging data types. We also focus on methods to overcome the open challenges related to data quality, model interpretability, and ethical implications.
Authors
- Abdolreza Marefat (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6526-5075)
- Claudio Angione (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3140-7909)
- Annalisa Occhipinti (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6075-1496)
- Giorgio Locicero (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1836-0480)
- Suraj Verma
- Le Minh Thao Doan
- Sneha Verma
- Kaveh Shahhosseini
Institutions
- Islamic Azad University South Tehran Branch (IR)
- University of Catania (IT)
- Teesside University (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Communications Engineering
- Published
- 2026-02-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-026-00602-x
- Primary Topic
- Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council