A Comprehensive Review Tracing the Evolution of Volumetric Medical Imaging Analysis from Classic CNNs to Emerging AI-Agents

Abstract

Volumetric medical imaging has redefined modern healthcare, enabling precise diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning. During the past decade, the field has undergone a paradigm shift from classical deep learning architectures to multimodal, agent-driven AI systems capable of uncovering rich volumetric biomarkers and utilizing heterogeneous data for predictive and generative modeling. Existing surveys are fragmented, focusing on specific models or tasks instead of offering a unified view of volumetric learning evolution. This study traces the evolution from classical models (Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks, and transformers) to generative approaches (Variational Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks, and diffusion models) and finally to foundation models and AI-agents that enable advanced reasoning and adaptive clinical workflows. As the reported performance varies substantially across datasets, imaging modalities, and evaluation protocols, this review emphasizes methodological evolution, representative innovations, and practical implications rather than direct numerical ranking of competing architectures. For each paradigm, we critically assess methodological innovations, strengths, limitations, and comparative performance in segmentation, classification, detection, reconstruction, and report generation. Beyond synthesizing progress, we identify persistent challenges, including data scarcity, generalization between institutions, and clinical trustworthiness, and outline emerging frontiers in multimodal fusion, explainable AI, and human–AI collaboration. This review provides a unified framework for understanding the evolution of volumetric medical imaging and offers actionable insights for researchers, clinicians, and industry practitioners, contributing to the development of reliable, interpretable, and clinically deployable next-generation medical AI systems. To support further research, we provide a GitHub repository that includes popular 3D medical imaging datasets with recent 3D models in our shared GitHub repository (https://github.com/Owais-CodeHub/3D-Medical-Imaging-Review).