Currently submitted to: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Oct 19, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 21, 2026 - Dec 16, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Synthetic Data Generation for Multimodal Healthcare Diagnostics: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis Protocol of Image and Tabular Data Engineering
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Diagnostic artificial intelligence increasingly combines medical images with structured clinical data. Synthetic data may support model development when access to representative patient data is limited, but fidelity, privacy, and diagnostic utility require separate evaluation. Cross-modal consistency introduces additional challenges for linked image and tabular data.
Objective:
Objective:
To systematically characterise methods for generating synthetic medical images, tabular health data, and jointly generated multimodal data, and to synthesise evidence on engineering quality, diagnostic utility, privacy, representation, and reproducibility.
Methods:
Methods:
We will search MEDLINE, Embase, IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, and the Cochrane Library from January 1, 2014, without a language restriction. Supplementary searches will cover preprints, conference proceedings, technical and regulatory sources, repositories and citation networks. Eligible studies must report a relevant synthetic-data method and at least one evaluation of the generated data. Two reviewers will independently screen, extract and appraise evidence. Appraisal will combine design-appropriate tools with a seven-domain synthetic-data framework. Narrative synthesis will distinguish imaging, tabular, and jointly generated multimodal data; comparable quantitative findings will be summarised descriptively.
Results:
Results:
The protocol was registered on September 18, 2026. Database searching was underway as of October 12, 2026. The registered anticipated completion date is April 30, 2027. No review findings are reported in this protocol.
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
The review will identify which synthetic-data claims are supported by evaluation and which remain uncertain, informing reproducible engineering and clinically relevant validation of diagnostic datasets.
Citation
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Copyright
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