Bridging Data Gaps in Healthcare: A Scoping Review of Transfer Learning in Biomedical Data Analysis

TL;DR

This review explores how transfer learning can address data scarcity and privacy issues in biomedical research, highlighting its limited current use and proposing best practices for effective application in healthcare data analysis.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive review of transfer learning applications in structured biomedical data and offers guidelines for its effective implementation in healthcare research.

Findings

Only 2% of studies used external data sources.

7% addressed multi-site collaboration with privacy constraints.

Transfer learning has limited but promising applications in biomedical data analysis.

Abstract

Clinical and biomedical research in low-resource settings often faces significant challenges due to the need for high-quality data with sufficient sample sizes to construct effective models. These constraints hinder robust model training and prompt researchers to seek methods for leveraging existing knowledge from related studies to support new research efforts. Transfer learning (TL), a machine learning technique, emerges as a powerful solution by utilizing knowledge from pre-trained models to enhance the performance of new models, offering promise across various healthcare domains. Despite its conceptual origins in the 1990s, the application of TL in medical research has remained limited, especially beyond image analysis. In our review of TL applications in structured clinical and biomedical data, we screened 3,515 papers, with 55 meeting the inclusion criteria. Among these, only 2% (one out of 55) utilized external studies, and 7% (four out of 55) addressed scenarios involving multi-site collaborations with privacy constraints. To achieve actionable TL with structured medical data while addressing regional disparities, inequality, and privacy constraints in healthcare research, we advocate for the careful identification of appropriate source data and models, the selection of suitable TL frameworks, and the validation of TL models with proper baselines.