This report synthesises findings from 14 peer-reviewed papers addressing the following research question: Does replacing concatenation with attention-based fusion in multimodal alignment frameworks improve sample efficiency and downstream task performance on zero-shot classification benchmarks. Today, despite decades of developments in medicine and the growing interest in precision healthcare, vast majority of diagnoses happen once patients begin to show noticeable signs of illness. Early indication and detection of diseases, however, can provide patients and carers. 7 claims were extracted from source literature; 7 were independently verified against retrieved documents. An automated multi-reviewer quality assessment produced a score of 9.3/10. This report is a machine-generated literature synthesis and does not constitute original research.Research goal: Does replacing concatenation with attention-based fusion in multimodal alignment frameworks improve sample efficiency and downstream task performance on zero-shot classification benchmarks?Autonomous literature synthesis. Automated review score: 9.3/10. Full text and citation available at Assignee Research.