The paper introduces FOCUS, a cross‑dataset benchmark for retinal fundus models that evaluates vision‑only encoders, vision‑language dual encoders, and multimodal large language models across ten public datasets. It measures ranking performance, calibration, subgroup disparities, and image‑quality robustness for tasks such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucomatous optic neuropathy. Results show no single model family dominates, with vision‑only encoders ranking highest on average, while fine‑tuning improves in‑domain performance but varies in external transfer.
By David Restrepo, Chenwei Wu, Luis Filipe Nakayama, Miguel L. Martins, Stergios Christodoulidis, Maria Vakalopoulou, Enzo Ferrante
The study evaluates fundus-specific foundation models (FM) for detecting diabetic macular edema (DME) in retinal images. It compares two popular FM—RETFound and FLAIR—against a lightweight EfficientNet-B0 backbone across multiple datasets (IDRiD, MESSIDOR-2, and OCT-and-Eye-FundusImages). Results indicate that FM do not consistently outperform fine‑tuned CNNs; EfficientNet-B0 often matches or exceeds FM performance, with FLAIR being the most competitive FM.
By Franco Javier Arellano, Jos\'e Ignacio Orlando
arXiv:2603. 18846v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are used to extract transferable representations from large amounts of unlabeled data, typically via self-supervised learning (SSL).
By Samuel Ofosu Mensah, Camila Roa, Kerol Djoumessi, Philipp Berens
The paper explores contrastive self‑supervised learning (SSL) for retinal fundus image classification, comparing SimSiam and SimCLR under limited data and computational resources. It investigates how retinal‑specific augmentation strategies and training parameters affect representation quality, evaluated through linear probing and fine‑tuning on multi‑disease classification and diabetic retinopathy grading tasks. The results demonstrate that tailored augmentations enable lightweight SSL models to learn transferable representations, reducing reliance on large annotated datasets while achieving competitive performance.
The paper explores contrastive self‑supervised learning (SSL) for retinal fundus image classification, comparing SimSiam and SimCLR under limited data and computational resources. It investigates how retinal‑specific augmentation strategies and training parameters affect representation quality, evaluated through linear probing and fine‑tuning on multi‑disease classification and diabetic retinopathy grading tasks. Results indicate that tailored augmentations enable lightweight SSL models to learn transferable representations, reducing reliance on large annotated datasets while achieving competitive performance.
By Bekzat Nurlanbekova, Fung Fung Ting
arXiv:2608. 09752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retinal fundus images frequently exhibit multiple co-occurring pathologies, yet standard deep learning classifiers apply static, identical computation to every image regardless of the underlying disease distribution.
By Nagur Shareef Shaik, Jeongwoo Park, Yeong-Jin Kim, Jaeuk Jung, Hyunjung Oh, Dong Hye Ye
arXiv:2603. 07131v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) show immense potential for automated ophthalmic diagnosis.
By Shuai Lu, Meng Wang, Jia Guo, Jiawei Du, Bo Liu, Shengzhu Yang, Weihang Zhang, Huazhu Fu, Huiqi Li
OptiModNet is a lightweight UNet‑Transformer hybrid designed for optic disc and cup segmentation. It incorporates grouped‑query and channel attention across multiple stages, along with an Aggregated Pyramid Loss to improve gradient flow and structural consistency. Evaluated on the REFUGE2 dataset, it surpasses existing methods by over 2.5 % while using only 3.73 GFLOPs and 1.93 M parameters.
By Soumili Ghosh, Debapriya Roy, Aryan Das, Bikash Santra
arXiv:2607. 14703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become the main paradigm for whole-slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology.
By Mingxi Fu, Jiawen Li, Renao Yan, Jiali Hu, Qiehe Sun, Tian Guan, Yonghong He
arXiv:2607. 13043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art image classification but face deployment challenges due to computational costs and energy demands.
By Daniel Vila-Cruz, Laura Mor\'an-Fern\'andez, Ver\'onica Bol\'on-Canedo
arXiv:2609.06699v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Glaucoma is a progressive optic neuropathy characterized by irreversible damage to the optic nerve, making timely diagnosis critical to prevent perma...
By Abdullah Al Shafi, Nishat Sadaf Lira, Abrar Hasan, Kazi Saeed Alam, Swapnil Kundu Argha
The paper presents a two‑pipeline framework for retinal fundus analysis that combines four‑class disease classification with vessel segmentation. It fine‑tunes eight ImageNet‑pretrained CNNs on the FIVES dataset, applies five gradient‑based explanation methods to assess model interpretability, and benchmarks ten U‑Net variants—including transformer‑based and attention‑enhanced architectures—on the FIVES and DRIVE datasets. The best classification results come from ResNet101 (94.17% accuracy), while the strongest segmentation performance is achieved by Attention U‑Net with a ResNet101V2 backbone, improving DRIVE IoU from 60.80% to 64.83%.
By Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Pronay Debnath, Asif Iftekher Fahim, Faisal Muhammad Shah