Data harmonisation for information fusion in digital healthcare: A state-of-the-art systematic review, meta-analysis and future research directions

TLDR

Digital healthcare studies face challenges in removing bias and variance from multicentre data, requiring integration of clinical features across scanners and protocols, yet existing surveys of computational fusion methods rarely address evaluation metrics or provide a harmonisation checklist. The review aims to summarise computational data‑harmonisation approaches for multimodal digital healthcare data and to propose a comprehensive checklist guiding researchers in reporting such studies. The authors performed a systematic review of computational data‑harmonisation methods for multimodal digital healthcare, categorising strategies and evaluation metrics, and developed a checklist of best practices. They produced flowcharts for selecting methodologies and metrics and identified limitations of existing methods to guide future research.

Abstract

Removing the bias and variance of multicentre data has always been a challenge in large scale digital healthcare studies, which requires the ability to integrate clinical features extracted from data acquired by different scanners and protocols to improve stability and robustness. Previous studies have described various computational approaches to fuse single modality multicentre datasets. However, these surveys rarely focused on evaluation metrics and lacked a checklist for computational data harmonisation studies. In this systematic review, we summarise the computational data harmonisation approaches for multi-modality data in the digital healthcare field, including harmonisation strategies and evaluation metrics based on different theories. In addition, a comprehensive checklist that summarises common practices for data harmonisation studies is proposed to guide researchers to report their research findings more effectively. Last but not least, flowcharts presenting possible ways for methodology and metric selection are proposed and the limitations of different methods have been surveyed for future research.