Exploring Deep Learning and Ultra-Widefield Imaging for Diabetic Retinopathy and Macular Edema

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Hauptverfasser: Jimenez-Lizcano, Pablo, Romero-Tapiador, Sergio, Tolosana, Ruben, Morales, Aythami, de Rivera, Guillermo González, Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben, Fierrez, Julian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Jimenez-Lizcano, Pablo
Romero-Tapiador, Sergio
Tolosana, Ruben
Morales, Aythami
de Rivera, Guillermo González
Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben
Fierrez, Julian
author_facet Jimenez-Lizcano, Pablo
Romero-Tapiador, Sergio
Tolosana, Ruben
Morales, Aythami
de Rivera, Guillermo González
Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben
Fierrez, Julian
contents Diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular edema (DME) are leading causes of preventable blindness among working-age adults. Traditional approaches in the literature focus on standard color fundus photography (CFP) for the detection of these conditions. Nevertheless, recent ultra-widefield imaging (UWF) offers a significantly wider field of view in comparison to CFP. Motivated by this, the present study explores state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) methods and UWF imaging on three clinically relevant tasks: i) image quality assessment for UWF, ii) identification of referable diabetic retinopathy (RDR), and iii) identification of DME. Using the publicly available UWF4DR Challenge dataset, released as part of the MICCAI 2024 conference, we benchmark DL models in the spatial (RGB) and frequency domains, including popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as well as recent vision transformers (ViTs) and foundation models. In addition, we explore a final feature-level fusion to increase robustness. Finally, we also analyze the decisions of the DL models using Grad-CAM, increasing the explainability. Our proposal achieves consistently strong performance across all architectures, underscoring the competitiveness of emerging ViTs and foundation models and the promise of feature-level fusion and frequency-domain representations for UWF analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_08235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Deep Learning and Ultra-Widefield Imaging for Diabetic Retinopathy and Macular Edema
Jimenez-Lizcano, Pablo
Romero-Tapiador, Sergio
Tolosana, Ruben
Morales, Aythami
de Rivera, Guillermo González
Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben
Fierrez, Julian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular edema (DME) are leading causes of preventable blindness among working-age adults. Traditional approaches in the literature focus on standard color fundus photography (CFP) for the detection of these conditions. Nevertheless, recent ultra-widefield imaging (UWF) offers a significantly wider field of view in comparison to CFP. Motivated by this, the present study explores state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) methods and UWF imaging on three clinically relevant tasks: i) image quality assessment for UWF, ii) identification of referable diabetic retinopathy (RDR), and iii) identification of DME. Using the publicly available UWF4DR Challenge dataset, released as part of the MICCAI 2024 conference, we benchmark DL models in the spatial (RGB) and frequency domains, including popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as well as recent vision transformers (ViTs) and foundation models. In addition, we explore a final feature-level fusion to increase robustness. Finally, we also analyze the decisions of the DL models using Grad-CAM, increasing the explainability. Our proposal achieves consistently strong performance across all architectures, underscoring the competitiveness of emerging ViTs and foundation models and the promise of feature-level fusion and frequency-domain representations for UWF analysis.
title Exploring Deep Learning and Ultra-Widefield Imaging for Diabetic Retinopathy and Macular Edema
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08235