Dementia Detection via Retinal Hyperspectral Imaging and Deep Learning: Clinical Dataset Analysis and Comparative Evaluation of Multiple Architectures

This study aimed to detect dementia using intelligent hyperspectral imaging (HSI), which enables the extraction of detailed spectral information from retinal tissues. A total of 3256 ophthalmoscopic images collected from 137 participants were analyzed. The spectral signatures of selected retinal regions were reconstructed using hyperspectral conversion techniques to examine wavelength-dependent variations associated with dementia. To assess the diagnostic capability of deep learning models, four convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures-ResNet50, Inception_v3, GoogLeNet, and EfficientNet-were implemented and benchmarked on two datasets: original ophthalmoscopic images (ORIs) and hyperspectral images (HSIs). The HSI-based models consistently demonstrated superior accuracy, achieving 84% with ResNet50, 83% with GoogLeNet, and 82% with EfficientNet, compared with 80-81% obtained from ORIs. Inception_v3 maintained an accuracy of 80% across both datasets. These results confirm that integrating spectral information enhances model sensitivity to dementia-related retinal changes, highlighting the potential of HSI for early and noninvasive detection.