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 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:2605. 14108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness, and automated screening can help extend specialist capacity in resource-constrained clinical workflows.
By Nishi Doshi, Shrey Shah
arXiv:2606. 08123v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model selection for safety-relevant visual recognition is often based on clean aggregate performance, although robustness, transfer, embedded latency, and explanation faithfulness may produce different preferences.
By Ruben Dario Florez-Zela
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...
By Xiaoyan Li, Shixin Xu, Arvind Gupta, Huaxiong Huang
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.
By Z\"ubeyr \"Ozeren, Tansel Uyar