NeuroFM: Toward Precision Neuroimaging with Foundation Models for Individualized Brain Health Estimation

Precision neuroimaging aims to deliver individualized assessments of brain health, yet a single structural MRI does not provide a scalable, multidimensional, quantitative summary of an individual's current or future health. Existing approaches optimize task-specific objectives, yielding representations entangled with cohort- or disease-specific signals rather than capturing biologically grounded anatomical patterns. Here, we introduce NeuroFM, a foundation model trained exclusively on 100,000 healthy synthetic volumes to predict morphometric and demographic targets. Without exposure to disease-labelled data, NeuroFM organizes brain structure into population-level patterns encoding brain health differences. These representations transfer across neuroscience domains without adaptation and support simple linear readouts for clinical, cognitive, developmental, socio-behavioural, and image quality. Evaluated on 136,361 multi-cohort volumes, NeuroFM generalizes across domains and enables individual-level brain health profiling, estimating future dementia risk years before diagnosis. Together, these findings establish a disease-naïve foundation model for precision neuroimaging with potential to support quantitative brain health assessments across settings.

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Publication Details

Journal
medRxiv
Published
2026-03-31
DOI
https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.27.26349489
Primary Topic
Functional Brain Connectivity Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

NeuroFM: Toward Precision Neuroimaging with Foundation Models for Individualized Brain Health Estimation

Michele Sevegnani, Donald M. Lyall, Alessio Fracasso, Michele Svanera et al.
medRxiv
Functional Brain Connectivity Studies
article

NeuroFM: Toward Precision Neuroimaging with Foundation Models for Individualized Brain Health Estimation

Michele Sevegnani, Donald M. Lyall, Alessio Fracasso, Michele Svanera, Connor Dalby, Austin Jon Dibble, Monika Harvey
article en

Abstract

Precision neuroimaging aims to deliver individualized assessments of brain health, yet a single structural MRI does not provide a scalable, multidimensional, quantitative summary of an individual's current or future health. Existing approaches optimize task-specific objectives, yielding representations entangled with cohort- or disease-specific signals rather than capturing biologically grounded anatomical patterns. Here, we introduce NeuroFM, a foundation model trained exclusively on 100,000 healthy synthetic volumes to predict morphometric and demographic targets. Without exposure to disease-labelled data, NeuroFM organizes brain structure into population-level patterns encoding brain health differences. These representations transfer across neuroscience domains without adaptation and support simple linear readouts for clinical, cognitive, developmental, socio-behavioural, and image quality. Evaluated on 136,361 multi-cohort volumes, NeuroFM generalizes across domains and enables individual-level brain health profiling, estimating future dementia risk years before diagnosis. Together, these findings establish a disease-naïve foundation model for precision neuroimaging with potential to support quantitative brain health assessments across settings.

medRxiv
University of Padua (IT), University of Glasgow (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 37%
Functional Brain Connectivity Studies
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NeuroFM: Toward Precision Neuroimaging with Foundation Models for Individualized Brain Health Estimation — Michele Sevegnani, Donald M. Lyall, et al. · medRxiv (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS