When Do Domain-Specific Foundation Models Justify Their Cost? A Systematic Evaluation Across Retinal Imaging Tasks

arXiv:2511.22001 · eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV · Submitted 2025-11-27 · Read on arXiv

eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV

Submitted: 2025-11-27

Updated: 2025-11-27

Terminology

• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Foundation Model — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 4× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Color Fundus Photography — 1× in this paper
• Optical Coherence Tomography — 1× in this paper

Sources

• An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
• Vision Transformers Need Registers
• AIROGS: Artificial Intelligence for RObust Glaucoma Screening Challenge
• SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts
• Mixed Precision Training

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