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...
arXiv:2602.08580v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic extraction of retinal vascular biomarkers from color fundus images (CFI) is crucial for large-scale studies of the retinal vasculat...
arXiv:2606. 16234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.