Physics-informed Machine Learning for Medical Image Analysis

The incorporation of physical information in machine learning frameworks is transforming medical image analysis (MIA). Integrating fundamental knowledge and governing physical laws not only improves analysis performance but also enhances the model’s robustness and interpretability. This work presents a systematic review of over 100 papers on the utility of PINNs dedicated to MIA (PIMIA) tasks. We propose a unified taxonomy to investigate what physics knowledge and processes are modeled, how they are represented, and the strategies to incorporate them into MIA models. We delve deep into a wide range of image analysis tasks, from imaging, generation, prediction, inverse imaging (super-resolution and reconstruction), registration, and image analysis (segmentation and classification). For each task, we thoroughly examine and present the central physics-guided operation, the region of interest (with respect to human anatomy), the corresponding imaging modality, the datasets used for model training, the deep network architectures employed, and the primary physical processes, equations, or principles utilized. Additionally, we also introduce a novel metric to compare the performance of PIMIA methods across different tasks and datasets. Based on this review, we summarize and distill our perspectives on the challenges, and highlight open research questions and directions for future research.