A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

arXiv:2606.24168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information (X_1), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps (X_2), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding (X_3), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers (X_4). The spatial edge branch (X_{12}) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch (X_{34}) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-06-24