Interpretable Fundus Image Classification via Ring-Based Retinal Vasculature Features
Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.