The Department of Ophthalmology at the Universitätsspital Zürich is an active contributor to the Fight Retinal Blindness! (FRB!) registry, an international, clinician-led initiative collecting real-world longitudinal data on retinal diseases.

Retinal diseases such as AMD and DME are major causes of visual impairment worldwide. With the increasing availability of longitudinal ophthalmic imaging, especially Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), and detailed clinical records, there is a growing opportunity to leverage AI to support and optimize personalized treatment decisions.

Despite rapid advances in medical AI, real-world clinical decision support systems for retinal diseases are only limited to unimodality and/or static predictions, and are limited by challenges such as data heterogeneity, temporal variability, and the integration of multimodal inputs (e.g., imaging and clinical data). Foundation models (large pretrained models for visual and tabular inputs) prese...