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