# Robust retinal biometrics for patient identity verification and retrieval across age and imaging devices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31094 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31094/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [Evaluation of Retinal Image Quality Assessment Networks in Different Color-spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05345/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning-based Patient Re-identification Is able to Exploit the Biometric Nature of Medical Chest X-ray Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08562/) (2021)
- [VascX Models: Model Ensembles for Retinal Vascular Analysis from Color Fundus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16016/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Patient identity errors can compromise longitudinal medical records, research databases, and downstream clinical decisions. We present a retinal biometric system for verifying claimed identities and retrieving the correct identity from color fundus images. We trained a 512-dimensional metric-learning encoder combining a ConvNeXtV2 backbone with ArcFace and triplet losses on 227,004 images from 21,851 patient-eye identities in the Rotterdam Study, spanning multiple imaging devices and up to 32.6 years of follow-up. The system was evaluated on held-out Rotterdam Study data and externally on the UK Biobank and Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS). Before evaluation, we used the model to screen for identity inconsistencies and manually adjudicated flagged images, identifying incorrect assignments in 0.588% of Rotterdam Study images, 0.259% of UK Biobank images, and 0.164% of AREDS images. In retrospective-only verification after removing near-duplicate images, the system achieved AUROCs of 0.9998, 0.9997, and 0.9998 in the Rotterdam Study, UK Biobank, and AREDS, respectively. For identity retrieval using only previously acquired images, Recall@1 was 99.7%, 97.2%, and 97.6%, respectively, from galleries averaging 4436-8510 identities; the correct identity appeared among the top five results in at least 98.6% of cases. Performance remained robust across imaging devices and long follow-up intervals, while lower image quality and inconsistent retinal fields accounted for most failures. These findings establish retinal anatomy as a durable biometric signal, useful for safeguarding the integrity of longitudinal imaging records.