Has multimodal learning delivered universal intelligence in healthcare? A comprehensive survey

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has constantly reshaped the field of intelligent healthcare and medicine. As a vital technology, multimodal learning has increasingly garnered interest because of data complementarity, comprehensive information fusion, and great application potential. Currently, numerous researchers are dedicating their attention to this field, conducting extensive studies and constructing abundant intelligent systems. Naturally, an open question arises that has multimodal learning delivered universal intelligence in healthcare? To answer this question, we adopt three unique viewpoints for a holistic analysis. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the current progress of medical multimodal learning from the perspectives of datasets, task-oriented methods, and universal foundation models. Based on them, we further discuss the proposed question from five issues to explore the real impacts of advanced techniques in healthcare, from data and technologies to performance and ethics. The answer is that current technologies have NOT achieved universal intelligence and there remains a significant journey to undertake. Finally, in light of the above reviews and discussions, we point out ten potential directions for exploration to promote multimodal fusion technologies in the domain, towards the goal of universal intelligence in healthcare.