Knowledge Graph Applications in Medical Imaging Analysis: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Background. There is an increasing trend to represent domain knowledge in structured graphs, which provide efficient knowledge representations for many downstream tasks. Knowledge graphs are widely used to model prior knowledge in the form of nodes and edges to represent semantically connected knowledge entities, which several works have adopted into different medical imaging applications. Methods. We systematically searched over five databases to find relevant articles that applied knowledge graphs to medical imaging analysis. After screening, evaluating, and reviewing the selected articles, we performed a systematic analysis. Results. We looked at four applications in medical imaging analysis, including disease classification, disease localization and segmentation, report generation, and image retrieval. We also identified limitations of current work, such as the limited amount of available annotated data and weak generalizability to other tasks. We further identified the potential future directions according to the identified limitations, including employing semisupervised frameworks to alleviate the need for annotated data and exploring task-agnostic models to provide better generalizability. Conclusions. We hope that our article will provide the readers with aggregated documentation of the state-of-the-art knowledge graph applications for medical imaging to encourage future research.