Benchmarking Ophthalmology Foundation Models for Clinically Significant Age Macular Degeneration Detection

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has enabled Vision Transformers (ViTs) to learn robust representations from large-scale natural image datasets, enhancing their generalization across domains. In retinal imaging, foundation models pretrained on either natural or ophthalmic data have shown promise, but the benefits of in-domain pretraining remain uncertain. To investigate this, we benchmark six SSL-pretrained ViTs on seven digital fundus image (DFI) datasets totaling 70,000 expert-annotated images for the task of moderate-to-late age-related macular degeneration (AMD) identification. Our results show that iBOT pretrained on natural images achieves the highest out-of-distribution generalization, with AUROCs of 0.80-0.97, outperforming domain-specific models, which achieved AUROCs of 0.78-0.96 and a baseline ViT-L with no pretraining, which achieved AUROCs of 0.68-0.91. These findings highlight the value of foundation models in improving AMD identification and challenge the assumption that in-domain pretraining is necessary. Furthermore, we release BRAMD, an open-access dataset (n=587) of DFIs with AMD labels from Brazil.

HYAMD High-Resolution Fundus Image Dataset for age related macular degeneration (AMD) Diagnosis

The Hillel Yaffe Age Related Macular Degeneration (HYAMD) dataset is a longitudinal collection of 1,560 Digital Fundus Images (DFIs) from 325 patients examined at the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center (Hadera, Israel) between 2021 and 2024. The dataset includes an AMD cohort of 147 patients (aged 54-94) with varying stages of AMD and a control group of 190 diabetic retinopathy (DR) patients (aged 24-92). AMD diagnoses were based on comprehensive clinical ophthalmic evaluations, supported by Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography. Non-AMD DFIs were sourced from DR patients without concurrent AMD, diagnosed using macular OCT, fluorescein angiography, and widefield imaging. HYAMD provides gold-standard annotations, ensuring AMD labels were assigned following a full clinical assessment. Images were captured with a DRI OCT Triton (Topcon) camera, offering a 45 deg field of view and 1960 x 1934 pixel resolution. To the best of our knowledge, HYAMD is the first open-access retinal dataset from an Israeli sample, designed to support AMD identification using machine learning models.