Cross-Species Adaptation of RETFound for Rodent OCT Age Estimation Reveals Strong CNN Baselines in Data-Scarce Space Biology
Alireza Hayati, Jian Gong, Vaishnavi Nagesh, Pinar Avci, Ariel Yuhan Ong, Mouayad Masalkhi, Justin Engelmann, Fathi Karouia, Pearse Andrew Keane, Sylvain V. Costes, Lauren Sanders
This paper benchmarks cross-species adaptation of a human retinal model to rodent OCT for age estimation, finding that CNN baselines outperform transformer models in small-sample settings.
bioRxiv · Apr 30, 2026 · PreprintBioinformatics