Interpretability of multimodal neural networks for prediction of visual acuity in patients with branch retinal vein occlusion
摘要
Branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) can cause persistent visual impairment, and predicting long-term best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) after anti-vascular endothelial growth factor treatment remains clinically challenging. This retrospective proof-of-concept study developed multimodal neural networks to predict 12-month BCVA classes using retinal images and clinical metadata from treatment-naive BRVO eyes. The best internal model used OCT-horizontal scans, OCTA images, baseline BCVA, central subfield thickness, age, and sex. We evaluated performance using adjacent accuracy, exact accuracy, and mean absolute error under five-fold cross-validation, and we analyzed attribution localization using Pathway Attribution. We additionally performed a supplementary exploratory cross-disease feasibility analysis using an available diabetic macular edema (DME) OCT cohort with 24-month visual acuity outcomes. This analysis was interpreted only as supplementary exploratory feasibility evidence and not as disease-matched BRVO external validation. Overall, the results suggest that multimodal imaging and clinical metadata may provide complementary prognostic information after BRVO, but the modest predictive performance, retrospective single-center design, lack of disease-matched external validation, and limited attribution reliability require cautious interpretation and further prospective validation.