Physics-Informed Deep Learning in Oncology

Abstract

Deep learning has enabled substantial advances in oncology, including cancer detection and diagnosis, medical image analysis, tumor characterization, treatment planning, response assessment, and outcome prediction. However, conventional data-driven models often require large annotated datasets, exhibit limited generalization across heterogeneous clinical settings, and lack explicit mechanisms for incorporating the physical, physiological, and biological principles underlying cancer development and treatment. Physics-informed deep learning (PIDL) integrates governing physical laws, mechanistic models, physiological constraints, and domain knowledge into deep learning frameworks, providing a principled approach for learning from sparse, noisy, and heterogeneous oncological data. This review presents a task-oriented synthesis of PIDL methods across oncology, encompassing neural networks, Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, convolutional and vision architectures, neural operators, generative models, and hybrid physics-data-driven frameworks. Their applications are examined across cancer detection and diagnosis, image reconstruction and analysis, tumor characterization, quantitative imaging, tumor progression, treatment response, radiation therapy, treatment planning, and multimodal clinical modeling. Based on the synthesized methodological and application-level evidence, we develop task-optimized PIDL workflows that align the clinical task with appropriate data representations, physical constraints, model architectures, and validation strategies. We further analyze key challenges, including physical-model fidelity, computational scalability, uncertainty quantification, domain generalization, standardized benchmarking, and clinical validation.