# CFCH: Coarse-Fine Collaborative Hierarchical Learning for Anterior Segment Disease Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32559/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [A Foundation Language-Image Model of the Retina (FLAIR): Encoding Expert Knowledge in Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07898/) (2023)
- [HiFuse: Hierarchical Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Network for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10218/) (2022)
- [MM-Retinal: Knowledge-Enhanced Foundational Pretraining with Fundus Image-Text Expertise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11793/) (2024)
- [HMIL: Hierarchical Multi-Instance Learning for Fine-Grained Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07660/) (2024)
- [Machine Learning for Cataract Classification and Grading on Ophthalmic Imaging Modalities: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04830/) (2020)
- [RetSTA: An LLM-Based Approach for Standardizing Clinical Fundus Image Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09358/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Attention for Sparse Volumetric Anomaly Detection in Subclinical Keratoconus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03346/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate classification of anterior segment diseases is crucial for ophthalmic screening and diagnosis. However, slit-lamp image analysis remains challenging due to substantial variability in imaging conditions and the intrinsic anatomical-disease hierarchy of ocular pathologies. Existing methods typically formulate this task as a flat multi-class classification problem, ignoring the structured dependency between anatomical regions (e.g., cornea, conjunctiva, and lens) and disease manifestations.To address these limitations, we propose CFCH, a Coarse-Fine Collaborative Hierarchical learning framework that explicitly models anatomical context and disease semantics through a dual-branch architecture. To enable effective cross-granularity collaboration, CFCH introduces semantic and cross-granularity attention consistency constraints, encouraging aligned yet complementary feature learning across branches. In addition, we construct AS-9K, a large-scale anterior segment dataset with 8975 images covering 12 common disease categories. To the best of our knowledge, AS-9K is the largest publicly available dataset for anterior segment image classification. Extensive experiments on two anterior segment datasets demonstrate that CFCH outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative visualizations further show more focused and lesion-relevant activation responses, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Code will be available at https://github.com/ybupengwang/CFCH.