Partial concordance of vascular phenotypes across retinal and peripheral microvascular beds in the OphtalmoLaus cohort

Background: Whether vascular phenotypes measured in one anatomical territory reflect those observed in other vascular beds remains unclear. Retinal imaging is increasingly used as a source of systemic vascular biomarkers, yet direct comparisons with oral and peripheral microcirculatory phenotypes within the same individuals remain limited. Methods: We investigated the cross-territory organisation of multimodal vascular phenotypes in a deeply phenotyped subset of the OphtalmoLaus cohort. The analysis included 2,523 participants with ocular imaging available after quality control, of whom 82 also underwent sublingual and sublabial microcirculatory imaging. Vascular features were derived from structural optical coherence tomography (OCT), OCT angiography (OCTA), colour fundus imaging (CFI), sublingual imaging, sublabial imaging, and an exploratory family of capillary network-derived OCTA features. Pairwise Pearson correlation coefficients were computed across all available feature pairs to examine within-modality structure and cross-modality concordance. Results: The global correlation matrix showed a clear block-diagonal organisation, with stronger within-modality than between-modality correlations. Distinct internal clustering was observed across OCT, OCTA, CFI, and exploratory capillary network-derived feature families, indicating coherent modality-specific vascular phenotype domains. Cross-modality correlations were generally weaker and more heterogeneous, arguing against a single strongly coupled vascular phenotype shared across all territories. Among extra-ocular comparisons, sublingual and sublabial features showed the clearest cross-bed concordance, whereas retinal structural and perfusion-related phenotypes showed only limited correspondence with oral and peripheral microcirculatory measures. Within the retinal domain, OCTA and CFI demonstrated the strongest cross-modality alignment, consistent with partial overlap between perfusion- and fundus-derived vascular phenotypes. Conclusions: Multimodal vascular phenotyping in OphtalmoLaus reveals a structured but only partially shared organisation of vascular traits across anatomical territories. These findings support a model of selective, territory-specific coupling across vascular beds and suggest that retinal and peripheral microcirculatory imaging provide overlapping yet non-redundant information.