# AIROGS: Artificial Intelligence for RObust Glaucoma Screening Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01738 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01738/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14791/) (2021)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [REFUGE Challenge: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Automated Methods for Glaucoma Assessment from Fundus Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03667/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [OmniMedVQA: A New Large-Scale Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Medical LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09181/) (2024)
- [On the Challenges and Perspectives of Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05705/) (2023)
- [Baichuan-Omni-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15368/) (2025)
- [A Foundation Language-Image Model of the Retina (FLAIR): Encoding Expert Knowledge in Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07898/) (2023)
- [VisionUnite: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Ophthalmology Enhanced with Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02865/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy in Rare and Common Fundus Diseases with a Knowledge-Rich Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09317/) (2024)
- [Training a high-performance retinal foundation model with half-the-data and 400 times less compute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00117/) (2024)
- [Advancing Medical Image Segmentation with Mini-Net: A Lightweight Solution Tailored for Efficient Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17520/) (2024)
- [A Pragmatic Note on Evaluating Generative Models with Fr'echet Inception Distance for Retinal Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17160/) (2025)
- [Systematic comparison of semi-supervised and self-supervised learning for medical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08919/) (2023)
- [Mask of truth: model sensitivity to unexpected regions of medical images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04030/) (2024)
- [SynFundus-1M: A High-quality Million-scale Synthetic fundus images Dataset with Fifteen Types of Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00377/) (2023)
- [RetinaLogos: Fine-Grained Synthesis of High-Resolution Retinal Images Through Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12887/) (2025)
- [Region Guided Attention Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18970/) (2024)
- [Predicting Diabetic Macular Edema Treatment Responses Using OCT: Dataset and Methods of APTOS Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05768/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Transferability of a Foundation Model for Fundus Images: Application to Hypertensive Retinopathy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15526/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Self-Supervised Learning in Medical Imaging: A Benchmark for Robustness, Generalizability, and Multi-Domain Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19124/) (2024)
- [Boosting Medical Visual Understanding From Multi-Granular Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15943/) (2025)
- [DiffuPT: Class Imbalance Mitigation for Glaucoma Detection via Diffusion Based Generation and Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03629/) (2024)
- [Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multimodal LLMs for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20070/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Ophthalmology: The State-of-the-Art and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04073/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Fundus Image-based Glaucoma Screening via Dynamic Global-Local Feature Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00431/) (2025)
- [Clinician-Friendly Foundation Models for Ophthalmic Image Diagnostics without Fine-Tuning or Technical Barriers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15928/) (2025)
- [BioVessel-Net and RetinaMix: Unsupervised Retinal Vessel Segmentation from OCTA Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23617/) (2025)
- [Forging a Dynamic Memory: Retrieval-Guided Continual Learning for Generalist Medical Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13072/) (2025)
- [Native Intelligence Emerges from Large-Scale Clinical Practice: A Retinal Foundation Model with Deployment Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14499/) (2025)
- [Compute-Efficient Medical Image Classification with Softmax-Free Transformers and Sequence Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01314/) (2024)
- [Adenocarcinoma Segmentation Using Pre-trained Swin-UNet with Parallel Cross-Attention for Multi-Domain Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15501/) (2024)
- [AI-Driven Approaches for Glaucoma Detection -- A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15947/) (2024)
- [Is Uncertainty Quantification a Viable Alternative to Learned Deferral?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02319/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The early detection of glaucoma is essential in preventing visual impairment. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to analyze color fundus photographs (CFPs) in a cost-effective manner, making glaucoma screening more accessible. While AI models for glaucoma screening from CFPs have shown promising results in laboratory settings, their performance decreases significantly in real-world scenarios due to the presence of out-of-distribution and low-quality images. To address this issue, we propose the Artificial Intelligence for Robust Glaucoma Screening (AIROGS) challenge. This challenge includes a large dataset of around 113,000 images from about 60,000 patients and 500 different screening centers, and encourages the development of algorithms that are robust to ungradable and unexpected input data. We evaluated solutions from 14 teams in this paper, and found that the best teams performed similarly to a set of 20 expert ophthalmologists and optometrists. The highest-scoring team achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.99 (95% CI: 0.98-0.99) for detecting ungradable images on-the-fly. Additionally, many of the algorithms showed robust performance when tested on three other publicly available datasets. These results demonstrate the feasibility of robust AI-enabled glaucoma screening.