# DiffuPT: Class Imbalance Mitigation for Glaucoma Detection via Diffusion Based Generation and Model Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03629 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03629/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 28 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04621/) (2017)
- [REFUGE Challenge: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Automated Methods for Glaucoma Assessment from Fundus Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03667/) (2019)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Neural Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15086/) (2023)
- [Attention Based Glaucoma Detection: A Large-scale Database and CNN Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10831/) (2019)
- [GANs for Medical Image Synthesis: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05318/) (2021)
- [AIROGS: Artificial Intelligence for RObust Glaucoma Screening Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01738/) (2023)
- [Multi-marginal Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00888/) (2019)
- [Simplifying Neural Network Training Under Class Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02517/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FairEnc: A Fair Vision-Language Model with Fair Vision and Text Encoders for Glaucoma Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04882/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Glaucoma is a progressive optic neuropathy characterized by structural damage to the optic nerve head and functional changes in the visual field. Detecting glaucoma early is crucial to preventing loss of eyesight. However, medical datasets often suffer from class imbalances, making detection more difficult for deep-learning algorithms. We use a generative-based framework to enhance glaucoma diagnosis, specifically addressing class imbalance through synthetic data generation. In addition, we collected the largest national dataset for glaucoma detection to support our study. The imbalance between normal and glaucomatous cases leads to performance degradation of classifier models. By combining our proposed framework leveraging diffusion models with a pretraining approach, we created a more robust classifier training process. This training process results in a better-performing classifier. The proposed approach shows promising results in improving the harmonic mean (sensitivity and specificity) and AUC for the roc for the glaucoma classifier. We report an improvement in the harmonic mean metric from 89.09% to 92.59% on the test set of our national dataset. We examine our method against other methods to overcome imbalance through extensive experiments. We report similar improvements on the AIROGS dataset. This study highlights that diffusion-based generation can be of great importance in tackling class imbalances in medical datasets to improve diagnostic performance.