A Hybrid Framework Bridging CNN and ViT based on Theory of Evidence for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Qiu, Junlai, Chen, Yunzhu, Zheng, Hao, Huang, Yawen, Li, Yuexiang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911240513650688
author Qiu, Junlai
Chen, Yunzhu
Zheng, Hao
Huang, Yawen
Li, Yuexiang
author_facet Qiu, Junlai
Chen, Yunzhu
Zheng, Hao
Huang, Yawen
Li, Yuexiang
contents Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss among middle-aged and elderly people, which significantly impacts their daily lives and mental health. To improve the efficiency of clinical screening and enable the early detection of DR, a variety of automated DR diagnosis systems have been recently established based on convolutional neural network (CNN) or vision Transformer (ViT). However, due to the own shortages of CNN / ViT, the performance of existing methods using single-type backbone has reached a bottleneck. One potential way for the further improvements is integrating different kinds of backbones, which can fully leverage the respective strengths of them (\emph{i.e.,} the local feature extraction capability of CNN and the global feature capturing ability of ViT). To this end, we propose a novel paradigm to effectively fuse the features extracted by different backbones based on the theory of evidence. Specifically, the proposed evidential fusion paradigm transforms the features from different backbones into supporting evidences via a set of deep evidential networks. With the supporting evidences, the aggregated opinion can be accordingly formed, which can be used to adaptively tune the fusion pattern between different backbones and accordingly boost the performance of our hybrid model. We evaluated our method on two publicly available DR grading datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our hybrid model not only improves the accuracy of DR grading, compared to the state-of-the-art frameworks, but also provides the excellent interpretability for feature fusion and decision-making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26315
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Hybrid Framework Bridging CNN and ViT based on Theory of Evidence for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
Qiu, Junlai
Chen, Yunzhu
Zheng, Hao
Huang, Yawen
Li, Yuexiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss among middle-aged and elderly people, which significantly impacts their daily lives and mental health. To improve the efficiency of clinical screening and enable the early detection of DR, a variety of automated DR diagnosis systems have been recently established based on convolutional neural network (CNN) or vision Transformer (ViT). However, due to the own shortages of CNN / ViT, the performance of existing methods using single-type backbone has reached a bottleneck. One potential way for the further improvements is integrating different kinds of backbones, which can fully leverage the respective strengths of them (\emph{i.e.,} the local feature extraction capability of CNN and the global feature capturing ability of ViT). To this end, we propose a novel paradigm to effectively fuse the features extracted by different backbones based on the theory of evidence. Specifically, the proposed evidential fusion paradigm transforms the features from different backbones into supporting evidences via a set of deep evidential networks. With the supporting evidences, the aggregated opinion can be accordingly formed, which can be used to adaptively tune the fusion pattern between different backbones and accordingly boost the performance of our hybrid model. We evaluated our method on two publicly available DR grading datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our hybrid model not only improves the accuracy of DR grading, compared to the state-of-the-art frameworks, but also provides the excellent interpretability for feature fusion and decision-making.
title A Hybrid Framework Bridging CNN and ViT based on Theory of Evidence for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26315