The paper presents an explainable diabetic retinopathy classification framework that leverages vision foundation models—DINOv2, CLIP, and Vision Transformer—combined with various transfer learning techniques such as full fine‑tuning, linear probing, and Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Using the ODIR dataset for internal validation and the APTOS dataset for external testing, DINOv2‑LoRA achieved the best internal AUROC (0.758) while DINOv2 and ViT full fine‑tuning reached the highest external AUROC (0.920). Explainability was assessed with Grad‑CAM and HiResCAM against expert‑annotated lesion masks from IDRiD, using Dice, IoU, and Pointing Game metrics, confirming that model attention aligns with clinically relevant retinal lesions.
By Abhishek Verma, Anila Krishna, Abhishek Gajanan Bankar, Juan Miguel Lopez Alcaraz
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:2605. 14108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness, and automated screening can help extend specialist capacity in resource-constrained clinical workflows.
By Nishi Doshi, Shrey Shah
arXiv:2606. 08123v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model selection for safety-relevant visual recognition is often based on clean aggregate performance, although robustness, transfer, embedded latency, and explanation faithfulness may produce different preferences.
By Ruben Dario Florez-Zela
arXiv:2608.24723v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retinal fundus photography is widely used for screening and monitoring ocular diseases, but many modern classification pipelines rely on deep latent re...
By Xiaoyan Li, Shixin Xu, Arvind Gupta, Huaxiong Huang
arXiv:2607. 19864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of preventable blindness; its early lesions are small, low contrast, and easily missed in manual screening.
By Z\"ubeyr \"Ozeren, Tansel Uyar
arXiv:2607. 03959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision impairment worldwide, highlighting the need for accurate and accessible screening tools.
By Rashadul Hasan Badhon, Atalie Carina Thompson, Jennifer I. Lim, Theodore Leng, Minhaj Nur Alam
Retinal fundus photography is widely used for screening and monitoring ocular diseases, but many modern classification pipelines rely on deep latent representations and provide limited interpretabilit...
arXiv:2607. 21068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated detection of vision impairing retina-based ocular conditions from fundus images is important for early screening, timely referral and reducing dependency on specialist-only assessment, for which neural network-based deep learning (DL) models have been widely utilized.
By Kritanu Chattopadhyay, Sayanjit Singha Roy, Soumya Chatterjee
The study proposes a diagnostic-guided approach to choose between stochastic and deterministic longitudinal imaging models based on whether inter-visit changes are driven by disease progression or acquisition variability. Applied to a large, heterogeneous Optos fundus autofluorescence archive, the diagnostic revealed weak time-dependent changes and limited benefit from stochastic models, leading to the development of the deterministic Temporal Retinal U‑Net (TRU). TRU outperformed other classical and deep‑learning comparators on image‑level and eye‑specific progression metrics across held‑out and independent zero‑shot transfer cohorts, though with slightly lower precision in a smaller cross‑vendor cohort.
By Liyin Chen, Souvick Mukherjee, Ines Maria De Carvalho Lains, Nazlee Zebardast, Mengyu Wang, Tobias Elze, Jason I. Comander
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