Counterfactual Explainability Framework With CycleGAN And Counterfactual-Classifier Alignnment Score for Retinal Disease Classification

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21068v1
• Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:00:31 GMT
• Title: Counterfactual Explainability Framework With CycleGAN And Counterfactual-Classifier Alignnment Score for Retinal Disease Classification
• Abstract summary: This study presents CounterFundus, a novel CycleGAN-driven counterfactual explainability framework.<n>For each pathological image, the counterfactual yielded by the CycleGAN generator represents an estimated healthy counterpart.<n>The Counterfactual-Classifier Alignment Score (CCAS) is introduced, embedding Spearman correlation, binary IoU and pointing accuracy into a single assessment protocol.
• Score: 0.8602553195689513
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Automated detection of vision impairing retina-based ocular conditions from fundus images is important for early screening, timely referral and reducing dependency on specialist-only assessment, for which neural network-based deep learning (DL) models have been widely utilized. However, explainability of the DL frameworks remains a major bottleneck for clinical adoption, particularly when model decisions are not linked to retinal regions that are clinically meaningful. To address this issue, this study presents CounterFundus, a novel CycleGAN-driven counterfactual explainability framework, integrating EfficientNet-B5-based retinal disease detection with visually interpretable disease-to-normal fundus image translation. For each pathological image, the counterfactual yielded by the CycleGAN generator represents an estimated healthy counterpart and the resultant difference map is utilized to localize disease-associated retinal changes. Unlike conventional post-hoc saliency methods, CounterFundus provides counterfactual explanations through visually plausible disease-to-normal retinal translation. Thereafter, to quantify the spatial agreement between counterfactual difference maps and classifier saliency, the Counterfactual-Classifier Alignment Score (CCAS) is introduced, embedding Spearman correlation, binary IoU and pointing accuracy into a single assessment protocol. To this end, EigenCAM-aligned evaluation demonstrates that the generated counterfactual explanations remain spatially consistent with classifier-relevant retinal evidence across all CCAS dimensions. Along with that, ablation studies further confirm that CCAS-filtered counterfactual augmentation improves the downstream classification performance in fundus images, establishing CounterFundus as a clinically-grounded, explainable artificially intelligence (XAI) framework for retinal disease detection.

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