Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Stem cell (SC) is a crucial factor of the human organ that is significantly important for clinical solutions. However, consideration of SC in the therapeutic or disease classification process is complex in terms of accurate classification and prediction. To overcome this issue, Machine learning (ML) is the most effective technique that is frequently used in cell-based clinical applications for diagnosis, treatment, and disease identification. Recently it has been implemented for SC observation which is a crucial factor for clinical solutions. Thus, the objective of this review work is to represent the effectiveness of ML techniques for SC observation from clinical perspectives with current challenges and future direction for further improvement. METHODS: In this study, we conducted a short review of ML-based applications in SCs investigation and classification for the improvement of clinical solutions. We explored studies from five scientific databases (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and PubMed) with several keywords related to the objective of our research study. After primary and secondary screening, 15 articles were utilized for this research study and summarized the observation results in terms of ten aspects (year of publication, focused area, objective, experimented datasets, selected ML classifiers, experimental procedure, classification parameter, overall performance in terms of accuracy, advancements, and limitations) with their current limitations and future improvement directions. KEY CONTENT AND FINDINGS: The majority of the existing literature review works are limited to focusing on specific SC-based investigation, limited evaluation attributes, and lack of challenges and future improvement suggestions. Also, most of the review work didn't consider the investigation of the effectiveness of the ML technique in SC biology. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate existing literature related to the development of clinical solutions considering ML techniques, in the area of SC and cell culture processes and highlight current challenges and future directions. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of studies focused on the disease identification process and implemented the convolutional neural network and support vector machine techniques. The prime limitations of the investigated studies are related to the focused area, investigated SCs, the small number of experimental datasets, and validation techniques. None of the studies provided complete evidence to determine an optimal ML technique for SC to build classification or predictive models. Therefore, further concern is required to develop and improve the developed solutions including other ML techniques, large datasets, and advanced evaluation processes.