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.
Authors
- Michele Sevegnani (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6773-9481)
- Donald M. Lyall (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3850-1487)
- Alessio Fracasso (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4542-112X)
- Michele Svanera (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7828-9209)
- Connor Dalby
- Austin Jon Dibble (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3963-041X)
- Monika Harvey
Institutions
- University of Padua (IT)
- University of Glasgow (GB)
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