# Triple-Phase Multimodal Knowledge Aggregation Framework for Microbial Keratitis Subtype Diagnosis on Slit-Lamp Photography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03740/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 1 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Microbial keratitis requires rapid pathogen identification to guide treatment, but culture- and PCR-based diagnostics are slow and resource-intensive. We developed a triple-phase multimodal framework for bacterial-versus-fungal keratitis classification using slit-lamp photographs acquired under blue-light, sclerotic-scatter, and white-light illumination, together with clinical metadata. The model combines cross-modality contrastive learning, modality-specific fine-tuning, and feature-level multimodal ensemble learning for patient-level prediction. We evaluated the framework on a multicenter dataset of 1,645 patients and 17,158 images from India and the United States. The model achieved 85.84% accuracy, 84.46% average F1-score, and 0.885 AUC. Site-specific evaluation showed that pooled results were overly optimistic, whereas resampling- and balance-based re-evaluation provided a more realistic assessment of cross-site generalization. Under all settings, our framework remained the top-performing approach. The code is available at https://github.com/yqwang01/TPMKA and dataset access will be provided subject to University of Michigan data-sharing clearance.