The study presents an interpretable AI framework for glaucoma screening using low-cost handheld retinal cameras in a West African population. Trained on 681 participants, the system achieved high performance across vessel segmentation, cup/disc segmentation, and optic nerve head feature detection, with classification AUCs of 0.85 for the handheld device and 0.93 for a tabletop camera. The model provides confidence scores and visual explanations to aid clinical interpretation.
By Charis Y. N. Chiang, Tarela Sarimiye, Adeyinka Ashaye, Martin Buist, Michael A. Hauser, Olusola Olawoye, Micha\"el J. A. Girard
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 paper introduces GlobeReady, a clinician-friendly platform that leverages the RetiGlobe foundation model for ophthalmic image diagnostics without requiring fine-tuning. RetiGlobe was pretrained in two stages: first with self-supervised learning on 38 million synthetic images, then with contrastive learning on 475,845 real image‑text pairs from diverse ethnicities, devices, and regions. GlobeReady was evaluated on 488,448 images from multiple international centers and tested prospectively with 31 ophthalmologists, also exploring domain generalisability, uncertainty quantification, OOD detection, and feature-based case retrieval.
By Meng Wang, Tian Lin, Qingshan Hou, Aidi Lin, Lianyu Wang, Jingcheng Wang, Qingsheng Peng, Truong X. Nguyen, Zhi Da Soh, Xiayin Zhang, Jingyan Yang, Danqi Fang, Ke Zou, Ting Xu, Can Can Xue, Ten Cheer Quek, Qinkai Yu, Minxin Liu, Hui Zhou, Zixuan Xiao, Guiqin He, Huiyu Liang, Tingkun Shi, Man Chen, Zhuangling Lin, Linna Liu, Yuanyuan Peng, Li Jia Chen, Chi Ming Chan, Xiaohong Li, Junren He, Zhirong Xu, Tingbing Fang, Yanli Wang, Qingzhi Wang, Wenyi Hu, Yujie Wang, Li Li, Jiaying Ye, Tonghui Ye, Liang Lyu, Yongjian Lu, Ruoshi Cai, Yiwen Tang, Qiuming Hu, Junhong Chen, Zhenhua Zhang, Cheng Chen, Yitian Zhao, Dianbo Liu, Jianhua Wu, Xinjian Chen, Changqing Zhang, Xiaojun Wu, Triet Thanh Nguyen, Yanda Meng, Yalin Zheng, Daoqiang Zhang, Xiaochun Cao, Yih Chung Tham, Ye Zhang, Ying Han, Alvin L Young, Mary Ho, Carmen K M Chan, Clement C Tham, Zhuoting Zhu, Carol Y. Cheung, Tien Yin Wong, Huazhu Fu, Haoyu Chen, Ching-Yu Cheng