New AI Framework REVEAL Uses Retinal Imaging and Risk Factors to Predict Alzheimer's and Dementia

A novel artificial intelligence framework named REVEAL (REtinal-risk Vision-Language Early Alzheimer's Learning) has been introduced to forecast the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. This system correlates color fundus images of the retina with personalized risk profiles specific to the disease. Traditional retinal analysis approaches often treat imaging and risk factors independently, hindering their capacity to identify essential multimodal patterns for early risk assessment. The retina serves as a unique, noninvasive insight into Alzheimer's and dementia, revealing early structural alterations through morphometric features. Established systemic and lifestyle risk factors contribute to disease vulnerability long before symptoms appear. Existing techniques seldom organize or align patients with comparable retinal and clinical traits, limiting the understanding of cross-modal connections. This framework overcomes these challenges by merging imaging and clinical data for improved predictive accuracy. The findings were shared on arXiv under the identifier 2604.18757v1.