MoEA-Net: Modality-Incremental Expert Aggregation Network for Retinal Prognostic Prediction

Automated analysis of temporal changes in multimodal retinal images is critical for the prognostic assessment of ophthalmic diseases. Unlike traditional single-timepoint diagnosis, tracking longitudinal changes across multiple imaging modalities introduces significant data bias challenges:

(1) Imbalanced modality samples compromise the integration of knowledge within minority modalities; (2) Heterogeneous visual patterns across modalities undermine the perception of disease-relevant biomarkers. To tackle these issues, we propose a Modality-Incremental Expert Aggregation Network (MoEA-Net), which unifies the inter-modal integration and intra-modal perception for enhanced retinal prognostic prediction. Specifically, we employ the large language model (LLM) with incremental LoRA layers for specific modalities to effectively integrate knowledge from imbalanced data. Besides, we introduce a Spatiotemporal-aware Expert (SAE) module to better perceive both the anatomical structures and longitudinal changes within modalities. By progressively combining the SAE module with incremental LoRA, MoEA-Net supports continual knowledge accumulation and improves accurate reasoning. Experimental results show that MoEA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on subretinal fluid change and visual recovery classification tasks, validating its effectiveness.