A Systematic Review of Contrastive Learning in Medical AI: Foundations, Biomedical Modalities, and Future Directions
George Obaido, Ibomoiye Domor Mienye, Kehinde Aruleba, C. W. Chukwu, Ebenezer Esenogho, Cameron Modisane
Abstract
Medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems depend heavily on high-quality data representations to support accurate prediction, diagnosis, and clinical decision-making. However, the availability of large, well-annotated medical datasets is often constrained by cost, privacy concerns, and the need for expert labeling, motivating growing interest in self-supervised representation learning. Among these approaches, contrastive learning has emerged as one of the most influential paradigms, driving major advances in representation learning across computer vision and natural language processing. This paper presents a comprehensive review of contrastive learning in medical AI, highlighting its theoretical foundations, methodological developments, and practical applications in medical imaging, electronic health records, physiological signal analysis, and genomics. Furthermore, we identify recurring challenges, including pair construction, sensitivity to data augmentations, and inconsistencies in evaluation protocols, while discussing emerging trends such as multimodal alignment, federated learning, and privacy-preserving frameworks. Through a synthesis of current developments and open research directions, this review provides insights to advance data-efficient, reliable, and generalizable medical AI systems.