Contrastive learning-based pretraining improves representation and transferability of diabetic retinopathy classification models.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of vision impairment in diabetic patients worldwide. Due to its prevalence, early clinical diagnosis is essential to improve treatment management of DR patients. Despite recent demonstration of successful machine learning (ML) models for automated DR detection, there is a significant clinical need for robust models that can be trained with smaller cohorts of dataset and still perform with high diagnostic accuracy in independent clinical datasets (i.