Domain-Specific Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Retinal Fundus Classification

Abstract

Despite the growing number of public datasets, annotated medical images remain scarce. Supervised learning methods achieve strong performance on many benchmarks, however require large amounts of labeled data, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain in the medical domain. To address this limitation, contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising alternative for learning useful representations from unlabeled data. In this work, we investigate two SSL frameworks, SimSiam and SimCLR, for retinal disease classification from fundus images. We focus on understanding how augmentation strategies and training parameters influence representation learning under resource-constrained settings. Given limited data and computational capacity, we explore the feasibility of training SSL models with small batch sizes incorporated with retinal-specific augmentation techniques. Through a series of experiments, we assess the quality of learned representations via linear evaluation and fine-tuning across downstream tasks, including multi-disease classification and diabetic retinopathy grading. Our results show that tailoring augmentation strategies to the characteristics of retinal images plays a critical role in improving performance. Even under constrained settings, lightweight SSL frameworks can learn transferable representations that reduce dependence on large annotated datasets and achieve competitive results.