Project Grant R01EY038687

The National Eye Institute awarded The Schepens Eye Research Institute $858,394 on August 1, 2026, under the Vision Research program (CFDA 93.867) to develop multimodal foundation models for eye disease screening and prognosis.

The research develops a vision-language foundation model trained on pairs of retinal images and clinical notes to enable downstream supervised models for detection and progression prediction of age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma. The project creates a reciprocal training paradigm called MutualAssist that simultaneously updates clinical text summarization by a large language model and feature learning by the foundation model. For disease detection, the model uses image data alone; for progression prediction, it integrates both image and text components. Ground truth labels are ascertained by clinician assessment. The research addresses three critical gaps in existing ophthalmic foundation models: incorporation of clinical notes, model domain adaptability, and federated learning strategies for cross-institutional training.

Performance occurs at Schepens' Boston, Massachusetts facility through July 31, 2030. Schepens is a nonprofit research organization affiliated with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Eye and Ear, operating primarily as a federal grant recipient for basic and translational vision research.