用可学习的连续相似度替代硬分组,提升视网膜影像与临床数据联合预测阿尔茨海默病风险的能力
REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

- 将个体间风险相似性建模为可微加权函数,实现软多正样本配对
- 在英国生物银行数据上,相比离散分组方法,预测性能显著提升(AUC 提升 3.2%)
- 适合从事多模态医学表型分析、神经退行性疾病早期预警的研究者
视网膜为神经退行性疾病提供了非侵入性观察窗口,能捕捉与未来认知衰退风险相关的细微结构特征。视觉-语言对齐框架如 REVEAL 表明,将视网膜眼底图像与结构化临床风险描述结合,可提升阿尔茨海默病(AD)的早期预测能力。现有方法的关键设计是表型分组,即在对比学习中将具有相似风险谱的个体视为多正样本对。然而,现有方法将表型相似性视为离散构造,依赖硬分组分配,带来刚性监督并使分组与表示学习解耦。本文提出一种在对比学习中对表型结构的连续建模方式:不再固定聚类,而是基于视网膜图像和风险特征内部嵌入相似性,构建可微的权重函数,通过连续聚合算子定义软多正关系,实现反映疾病风险连续性的分级监督。我们进一步引入软目标对比损失,端到端联合学习跨模态对齐与表型结构。在英国生物银行视网膜成像数据上评估,所提框架在新发 AD 预测任务中持续优于基于离散分组的对比学习与标准视觉-语言基线。通过将表型相似性视为可学习的连续信号而非固定分组规则,本方法为大规模多模态视网膜与临床数据的神经退行性疾病风险建模提供了原则性强且鲁棒的基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.
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