aiqbench analysis
This study demonstrates that for adapting self-supervised DINO models to low-data medical imaging tasks like CBCT analysis, the specific strategy of partially unfreezing the final transformer blocks is more critical than the backbone architecture itself. By optimizing this adaptation layer, the authors achieve a significant AUC improvement to 0.902, effectively outperforming both earlier DINO variants and standard supervised baselines. These findings offer a practical, low-compute pathway for deploying foundation models in specialized radiology settings without requiring massive domain-specific retraining.
Self-Supervised Vision Transformers for CBCT-Based Detection of Temporomandibular Joint Osteoarthritis
arXiv:2606.08364v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporomandibular joint osteoarthritis (TMJ OA) is a prevalent degenerative condition whose osseous changes are often subtle on cone-beam CT (CBCT), making automated detection challenging. We study how well the DINO family of self-supervised vision transformers -- DINOv1, DINOv2, DINOv2+reg, and RAD-DINO (a radiology-pretrained variant) -- transfers to CBCT, asking how much backbone adaptation is needed and of what kind. We propose a simple slice-based pipeline using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones: axial CBCT slices are encoded per-slice by a frozen or partially adapted ViT and aggregated via attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) for patient-level binary OA/Normal classification. Through systematic ablation across unfreezing strategies and aggregation designs on a multi-source CBCT dataset, we find that partial unfreezing of the final two transformer blocks is the decisive factor, improving AUC from 0.671 (fully frozen DINOv2) to 0.902. This outperforms DINOv1 (0.867), DINOv2+reg (0.774), and a supervised ImageNet ViT-B/16 baseline (0.843). Our results provide practical guidance for adapting DINO-family foundation models in low-data medical imaging settings, showing that adaptation strategy is a stronger driver of performance than backbone choice alone.
Abstract:Temporomandibular joint osteoarthritis (TMJ OA) is a prevalent degenerative condition whose osseous changes are often subtle on cone-beam CT (CBCT), making automated detection challenging. We study how well the DINO family of self-supervised vision transformers -- DINOv1, DINOv2, DINOv2+reg, and RAD-DINO (a radiology-pretrained variant) -- transfers to CBCT, asking how much backbone adaptation is needed and of what kind. We propose a simple slice-based pipeline using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones: axial CBCT slices are encoded per-slice by a frozen or partially adapted ViT and aggregated via attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) for patient-level binary OA/Normal classification. Through systematic ablation across unfreezing strategies and aggregation designs on a multi-source CBCT dataset, we find that partial unfreezing of the final two transformer blocks is the decisive factor, improving AUC from 0.671 (fully frozen DINOv2) to 0.902. This outperforms DINOv1 (0.867), DINOv2+reg (0.774), and a supervised ImageNet ViT-B/16 baseline (0.843). Our results provide practical guidance for adapting DINO-family foundation models in low-data medical imaging settings, showing that adaptation strategy is a stronger driver of performance than backbone choice alone.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2606.08364 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2606.08364v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08364 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 276 words