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.
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.
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.
CF‑NODE is a counterfactual test‑time adaptation framework designed for diabetic retinopathy grading across different cameras, clinics, and patient populations. It ranks internal spatial nodes by attention, feature magnitude, and similarity, then progressively attenuates the highest‑ranked nodes and calibrates predictions based on the stability of the expected grade response. Evaluated on five external datasets, CF‑NODE outperforms four existing methods, achieving higher AUC and macro‑F1 scores and providing more balanced recognition across severity levels.
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.
arXiv:2607. 02569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a safety-centered empirical evaluation of uncertainty-aware last-layer adaptation for referable diabetic retinopathy screening using RETFound, a self-supervised vision-transformer retinal foundation model used here as a frozen feature encoder, and the public APTOS 2019 and DDR diabetic retinopathy fundus image datasets.
The paper introduces Gated Knowledge‑Guided Prototype Transfer (GProtoT), a training‑free module that enhances zero‑support medical vision‑language models by transferring visual residuals from supported classes to missing ones using VLM similarity and clinical ontology distances. GProtoT employs an evidence gate to scale transfer based on semantic relevance, reducing negative transfer while modestly improving recall and accuracy in realistic one‑shot trials on MESSIDOR. The method requires no gradients, validation data, or extra inference, offering a low‑compute, accountable adaptation path for incomplete clinical supervision.
The study examines how the choice of camera—Canon versus Nikon—affects image quality and AI performance in retinal screening for diabetic retinopathy. In a Brazilian cohort of 8,524 patients, Nikon images were more than twice as likely to be of inadequate quality compared with Canon, despite being cheaper. Using a frozen pretrained retinal foundation model, the authors evaluated 12 disease classification tasks across different resolutions and classifiers, finding that camera-related performance differences vary widely and are not consistently mitigated by higher resolution or classifier choice.
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.
arXiv:2607. 05825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background.
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...
The study presents an unsupervised domain adaptation model that classifies normal versus abnormal retinal development using optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans from multiple devices and centres. Trained on labelled data from one OCT system and unlabelled data from another, the ResNet50‑based Domain Adversarial Neural Network achieved accuracies between 87.75% and 96.06% across six source‑to‑target pairings and maintained performance on an unseen Heidelberg Spectralis dataset. The approach demonstrates that OCT classification can be transferred across devices without requiring labelled target data, potentially enabling more consistent assessment of retinal development and large‑scale analysis of existing imaging datasets.
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...