Explainable AI for diabetic retinopathy detection using vision transformers
摘要
The heterogeneous acquisition, variability of orientation, and subtle lesions continue to challenge the screening of diabetic retinopathy through color fundus photographs. We formulate DR grading as a binary triage task (No-DR vs DR) and propose the All-ViT Hybrid framework, integrating complementary pretrained transformer backbones within a stability-oriented training schedule (head-only warm-up, partial unfreezing), optimized using AdamW with OneCycle scheduling, class-weighted cross-entropy, and mixed precision. Preprocessing includes luminance-space CLAHE and retinal field-of-view masking, and data splitting is performed using stratified sampling to preserve class balance. We perform post-hoc threshold tuning and test-time augmentation (optional), which is available for operating-point control and robustness. Over the competitive baselines (ConvNeXt, MobileNetV3-Large, EfficientNet-B0, DenseNet201), All-ViT Hybrid has an Accuracy of 0.9754, F1 of 0.9761, Precision of 0.9658, Recall of 0.9866, and measures of agreement