| Title: | Predicting cardiovascular disease risk using retinal optical coherence tomography imaging |
| Journal: | Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence |
| Published: | 18 Nov 2025 |
| Pubmed: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41341807/ |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2025.1624550 |
| URL: | https://public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2025.1624550/pdf |
Publication 18898
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Abstract
Introduction: Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death globally. Non-invasive, cost-effective imaging techniques play a crucial role in early detection and prevention of CVD. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has gained recognition as a noninvasive method of detecting microvascular alterations that might enable earlier identification and targeting of at-risk patients. In this study, we investigated the potential of OCT as an additional imaging technique to predict future CVD events.</p>
Methods: We analyzed retinal OCT data from the UK Biobank. The dataset included 612 patients who suffered a Myocardial Infarction (MI) or stroke within five years of imaging and 2,234 controls without CVD (total: 2,846 participants). A self-supervised deep learning approach based on Variational Autoencoders (VAE) was used to extract low-dimensional latent representations from high-dimensional 3D OCT images, capturing structural and morphological features of retinal and choroidal layers. These latent features, along with clinical data, were used to train a Random Forest (RF) classifier to differentiate between patients at risk of future CVD events (MI or stroke) and healthy controls.</p>
Results: Our model achieved an AUC of 0.75, sensitivity of 0.70, specificity of 0.70, and accuracy of 0.70. The choroidal layer in OCT images was identified as a key predictor of future CVD events, revealed through a novel model explainability approach.</p>
Discussion: Our findings demonstrate the potential of retinal OCT imaging, when combined with advanced deep learning methods, as a predictive tool for identifying individuals at increased risk of CVD events.</p>
7 Authors
- Cynthia Maldonado-Garcia
- Rodrigo Bonazzola
- Enzo Ferrante
- Thomas H. Julian
- Panagiotis I. Sergouniotis
- Nishant Ravikumar
- Alejandro F. Frangi
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