Disentangling representations of retinal images with generative models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Retinal fundus images play a crucial role in the early detection of eye diseases. However, the impact of technical factors on these images can pose challenges for reliable AI applications in ophthalmology. For example, large fundus cohorts are often confounded by factors like camera type, bearing the risk of learning shortcuts rather than the causal relationships behind the image generation process. Here, we introduce a population model for retinal fundus images that effectively disentangles patient attributes from camera effects, enabling controllable and highly realistic image generation. To achieve this, we propose a disentanglement loss based on distance correlation. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, we show that our models encode desired information in disentangled subspaces and enable controllable image generation based on the learned subspaces, demonstrating the effectiveness of our disentanglement loss. The project's code is publicly available: https://github.com/berenslab/disentangling-retinal-images.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 81 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Feb 2024.
Builds on
48 of 81 references.
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36 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 4.
8 papers.
- 2025A Pragmatic Note on Evaluating Generative Models with Fr'echet Inception Distance for Retinal Image Synthesiscited by 8
- 2024Benchmarking Dependence Measures to Prevent Shortcut Learning in Medical Imagingcited by 2
- 2025Enhancing Retinal Vessel Segmentation Generalization via Layout-Aware Generative Modellingcited by 0
- 2025Disentanglement and Assessment of Shortcuts in Ophthalmological Retinal Imaging Examscited by 0
- 2026SRA-Seg: Synthetic to Real Alignment for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026MeDUET: Disentangled Unified Pretraining for 3D Medical Image Synthesis and Analysiscited by 0
- 2026Mitigating Shortcut Learning via Feature Disentanglement in Medical Imaging: A Benchmark Studycited by 0
- 2026Ordinal Diffusion Models for Color Fundus Imagescited by 0
- 2026Ordinal Diffusion Models for Color Fundus Images27 Feb 2026
- 2026MeDUET: Disentangled Unified Pretraining for 3D Medical Image Synthesis and Analysis19 Feb 2026
- 2026Mitigating Shortcut Learning via Feature Disentanglement in Medical Imaging: A Benchmark Study17 Feb 2026
- 2026SRA-Seg: Synthetic to Real Alignment for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation3 Feb 2026
- 2025Disentanglement and Assessment of Shortcuts in Ophthalmological Retinal Imaging Exams13 Jul 2025
- 2025Enhancing Retinal Vessel Segmentation Generalization via Layout-Aware Generative Modelling3 Mar 2025
- 2025A Pragmatic Note on Evaluating Generative Models with Fr'echet Inception Distance for Retinal Image Synthesis24 Feb 2025
- 2024Benchmarking Dependence Measures to Prevent Shortcut Learning in Medical Imaging26 Jul 2024