Multimodal Deep Learning Approaches for Lung Disease Detection: A Review

Lung diseases are among the leading global causes of morbidity and mortality, and existing reviews on deep learning (DL) for pulmonary diagnosis rarely integrate imaging, acoustic, and electronic health record (EHR) modalities within a single framework. We aimed to synthesize the state of the art (2019–2024) in multimodal DL for lung disease detection and classification, identifying dominant architectures, performance benchmarks, and translational barriers across chest X-rays, CT scans, respiratory sounds, and EHRs. A structured narrative review was conducted using PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science, applying explicit inclusion criteria for peer-reviewed studies; performance metrics, dataset characteristics, and reported limitations were extracted. Research involving convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and more recent models such as Transformers have reported high performance in chest X-ray classification, whereas acoustic approaches based on spectrograms and self-supervised representations (e.g., Wav2Vec 2.0) show promising but dataset-dependent results.