Causal-RetiGraph: Cross-Cohort Retinal Support and Same-Subject Pathway Analysis for Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a local retinal lesion process and a visible manifestation of systemic microvascular injury. Modern retinal AI can grade images accurately, but often leaves unanswered how local lesion evidence, retinal vascular structure, and systemic disease pathways are connected. This paper introduces Causal-RetiGraph, a compact biomedical informatics framework that links retinal graph phenotypes with NHANES-anchored pathway modelling. The retinal-image fold constructs an interpretable X1234 phenotype from vessel maps, lesion evidence, image embeddings, and AutoMorph biomarkers through spatial X12 and Jacobian X34 branches. The NHANES fold models systemic exposures, covariates, a same-subject retinal mediator family R^*, and downstream outcome families. X1234 is used for retinal support and pathway prioritisation, while R^* is used for participant-level pathway summaries. On the retinal fold, X1234 achieves 0.9055 binary DR accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC, with graded DR QWK of 0.8312. The results show that lesion and biomarker streams improve contextual retinal representation under scarce and imbalanced data. In NHANES, HbA1c, urine albumin, pulse pressure, fasting glucose, and systolic blood pressure are the strongest binary DR anchors. Participant-level pathway analysis identifies glycaemic--renal and glycaemic--haemodynamic pathways as the clearest mediator-style signals. These results suggest that retinal graph phenotypes can help prioritise systemic pathways in DR while preserving the distinction between image-derived support and same-subject mediation.