Exploring the Effectiveness of Deep Features from Domain-Specific Foundation Models in Retinal Image Synthesis

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Hauptverfasser: Skorniewska, Zuzanna, Papiez, Bartlomiej W.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Skorniewska, Zuzanna
Papiez, Bartlomiej W.
author_facet Skorniewska, Zuzanna
Papiez, Bartlomiej W.
contents The adoption of neural network models in medical imaging has been constrained by strict privacy regulations, limited data availability, high acquisition costs, and demographic biases. Deep generative models offer a promising solution by generating synthetic data that bypasses privacy concerns and addresses fairness by producing samples for under-represented groups. However, unlike natural images, medical imaging requires validation not only for fidelity (e.g., Fréchet Inception Score) but also for morphological and clinical accuracy. This is particularly true for colour fundus retinal imaging, which requires precise replication of the retinal vascular network, including vessel topology, continuity, and thickness. In this study, we in-vestigated whether a distance-based loss function based on deep activation layers of a large foundational model trained on large corpus of domain data, colour fundus imaging, offers advantages over a perceptual loss and edge-detection based loss functions. Our extensive validation pipeline, based on both domain-free and domain specific tasks, suggests that domain-specific deep features do not improve autoen-coder image generation. Conversely, our findings highlight the effectiveness of con-ventional edge detection filters in improving the sharpness of vascular structures in synthetic samples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11753
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Effectiveness of Deep Features from Domain-Specific Foundation Models in Retinal Image Synthesis
Skorniewska, Zuzanna
Papiez, Bartlomiej W.
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The adoption of neural network models in medical imaging has been constrained by strict privacy regulations, limited data availability, high acquisition costs, and demographic biases. Deep generative models offer a promising solution by generating synthetic data that bypasses privacy concerns and addresses fairness by producing samples for under-represented groups. However, unlike natural images, medical imaging requires validation not only for fidelity (e.g., Fréchet Inception Score) but also for morphological and clinical accuracy. This is particularly true for colour fundus retinal imaging, which requires precise replication of the retinal vascular network, including vessel topology, continuity, and thickness. In this study, we in-vestigated whether a distance-based loss function based on deep activation layers of a large foundational model trained on large corpus of domain data, colour fundus imaging, offers advantages over a perceptual loss and edge-detection based loss functions. Our extensive validation pipeline, based on both domain-free and domain specific tasks, suggests that domain-specific deep features do not improve autoen-coder image generation. Conversely, our findings highlight the effectiveness of con-ventional edge detection filters in improving the sharpness of vascular structures in synthetic samples.
title Exploring the Effectiveness of Deep Features from Domain-Specific Foundation Models in Retinal Image Synthesis
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11753