Combining Real and Synthetic Data to Overcome Limited Training Datasets in Multimodal Learning.

Biomedical data are inherently multimodal, capturing complementary aspects of a patient condition. Deep learning (DL) algorithms that integrate multiple biomedical modalities can significantly improve clinical decision-making, especially in domains where collecting data is not simple and data are highly heterogeneous. However, developing effective and reliable multimodal DL methods remains challenging, requiring large training datasets with paired samples from modalities of interest. An increasing number of de-identifed biomedical datasets are publicly accessible, though they still tend to be unimodal. For example, several publicly available skin lesion datasets aid automated dermatology clinical decision-making. Still, they lack annotated reports paired with the images, thereby limiting the advance and use of multimodal DL algorithms. This work presents a strategy exploiting real and synthesized data in a multimodal architecture that encodes fine-grained text representations within image embeddings to create a robust representation of skin lesion data. Large language models (LLMs) are used to synthesize textual descriptions from image metadata that are subsequently paired with the original skin lesion images and used for model development. The architecture is evaluated on the classification of skin lesion images, considering nine internal and external data sources. The proposed multimodal representation outperforms the unimodal one on the classification of skin lesion images, achieving superior performance in every tested dataset.