arXiv Machine Learning

Disentangling Co-Occurring Retinal Pathologies with Saliency-Guided Sparse Expert Routing

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

Counterfactual Explainability Framework With CycleGAN And Counterfactual-Classifier Alignnment Score for Retinal Disease Classification

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Interpretable Retinal Disease Prediction Using Biology-Informed Heterogeneous Graph Representations

The paper introduces a biology-informed heterogeneous graph representation that models retinal vessel segments, intercapillary areas, and the foveal avascular zone to predict diabetic retinopathy stages from OCTA images. This graph-based approach reframes staging as a graph-level classification task solved with a graph neural network, achieving AUC-ROC values up to 84% and outperforming biomarker-based classifiers, CNNs, and vision transformers. The method also provides detailed, interpretable explanations by precisely localizing abnormal vessels and non-perfusion areas.

By Laurin Lux, Alexander H. Berger, Maria Romeo Tricas, Richard Rosen, Alaa E. Fayed, Sobha Sivaprasada, Linus Kreitner, Jonas Weidner, Martin J. Menten, Daniel Rueckert, Johannes C. Paetzold
arXiv AI
Aug 20

OptiModNet: A UNet-Transformer Hybrid with Grouped-Query and Channel Attention for Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation

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 Machine Learning
Aug 3

MoPET: Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts for Unified Medical Image Classification

arXiv:2607. 29462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting deep learning models to profound clinical heterogeneity typically relies on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to avoid the severe overfitting associated with full end-to-end network updates.

By Sebastian Doerrich, Daniel W\"urtinger, Francesco Di Salvo, Shyam Nandan Rai, Christian Ledig
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Evaluating Fundus-Specific Foundation Models for Diabetic Macular Edema Detection

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 AI
Sep 1

Co-Annotator: Expert-Distilled ViT and VLM for Visual and Documentation Guidance in Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Co-Annotator is a clinical AI system that distills expert gaze and dictation into two guidance components: a gaze‑aligned Vision Transformer that highlights fixation‑aligned areas of interest (AOIs) and an ontology‑bounded vision‑language model that pre‑fills editable biomarker summaries for retinal OCT. In controlled studies, each modality independently improved diagnostic accuracy and biomarker generation, and when combined across two academic institutions, the system increased correct diagnoses per minute by 40% and reduced comment editing time by 67% without compromising accuracy.

By Ziheng "Leo" Li, Benjamin Freeman, Akshay Raman, Kavin Aravindhan Rajkumar, Xinxin Fang, Rishabh Srivastava, Steven Feiner, Kaveri A. Thakoor
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Explainable Convolutional Neural Networks for Retinal Fundus Classification and Cutting-Edge Segmentation Models for Retinal Blood Vessels from Fundus Images

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