A Dataset-Centric Benchmark of Deep Learning Methods for Grape Leaf Disease Classification and Detection

Grape leaf disease recognition is important for precision agriculture, enabling early diagnosis, timely intervention, and improved vineyard management. Although deep learning has achieved strong results, many studies rely on few datasets, often acquired under controlled conditions, and may not reflect real vineyard challenges such as complex backgrounds, variable illumination, occlusion, leaf pose, disease severity, and device differences. This paper presents a dataset-centric benchmark of deep learning methods for grape leaf disease classification and detection. We analyze publicly available datasets in terms of disease categories, annotation types, acquisition conditions, image characteristics, class distributions, provenance, and task suitability. Representative models are evaluated in three settings: image-level classification, region-level classification, and object detection. Classification is assessed using accuracy, while detection is evaluated using mAP@50 and mAP@50:95. Cross-dataset experiments further examine transfer between datasets with compatible disease categories but different visual and annotation characteristics. Results show near-saturated classification performance on several controlled or derivative datasets, greater difficulty on heterogeneous datasets, and substantial variation in detection performance across annotation settings. Cross-dataset performance drops sharply, especially for object detection, indicating that shared disease labels do not necessarily define equivalent recognition tasks. The benchmark emphasizes dataset provenance, realistic field evaluation, annotation compatibility, and external validation for reliable vineyard disease recognition.

LightTeaNet: A Weakly Supervised Lightweight CNN for Multi-Label Tea Leaf Disease Detection and Localization

Tea is known as an important crop in many parts of South and Southeast Asia, yet the production of tea is still hampered by the multiple diseases that decrease the quantity and quality. Traditional methods of inspection, which are manual, are not consistent, labor-intensive, and depend on extensive monitoring. This paper introduces a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for weakly supervised multi-label classification and disease localization in tea leaves called LightTeaNet. LightTeaNet learns directly from image-level labels and employs Class Activation Mapping (CAM) to localize disease-affected regions automatically, unlike conventional object detection models such as YOLO, which require extensive bounding box annotations. For Parameter efficiency, the network integrates Depthwise Separable Convolutions, and for enhanced feature discrimination, it integrates Channel Attention. LightTeaNet has achieved a Precision of 0.9615, a Recall of 0.8772, and an F1-score of 0.9179, while it shows mAP@0.50=0.1810 without any manual annotations, which delivers a competitive localization performance in the experimental results. These results validate the model as an interpretable as well as a resource-efficient framework for intelligent disease monitoring in agriculture.

Classification of Disease from Lungs X-ray Images using VGG16, VGG19 and ResNet50 Models

With the increase in the number of cases related to respiratory diseases, there is an urgent need to detect them early and diagnose them accurately. Convolutional neural networks have given promising results when used for diagnosing diseases using imaging tests. In this study, we investigate the potential of applying deep learning algorithms such as VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50 for classification of lung ailments based on X-ray images. A detailed analysis of the aforementioned models' performances was conducted to assess how well they can classify various types of lung ailments, including pneumonia, tuberculosis, lung cancer, and normal lungs. In order to do that, these deep learning models were trained on a vast amount of X-ray images. The results of our study show that while all three models provide good results, ResNet-50 performs best in comparison with other models due to its efficiency and high level of accuracy. We believe that these deep learning models can be successfully implemented in the practice of diagnosing pulmonary diseases in the future. It helps with early disease detection and improves patient outcomes.

Automating Visual Recognition of Leprosy in Wild Chimpanzees

Leprosy (Mycobacterium leprae) has been confirmed in wild western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in West Africa, presenting as clear and progressive visual symptoms. Manual review of camera-trap footage at landscape scale is infeasible, motivating the need for automated screening. We present the first deep learning pipeline for wildlife leprosy detection and contribute the PanLep300 dataset of 125,670 annotated bounding-box crops across 953 tracks from 303 camera-trap videos with ecologically-motivated splits that withhold whole individuals and camera installations. We benchmark spatial (2D), temporally aggregated (2.5D), and video-based (3D) classification approaches to investigate which approach is best suited to automated leprosy detection in wild apes. We find that simple aggregation of crop-level predictions consistently matches or outperforms both learned temporal models and end-to-end video architectures -- consistent with leprosy's static cutaneous presentation. We further find that performance is suppressed when tracklets contain frames of partially visible individuals -- as commonly occurs at the start and end of a track -- and demonstrate that this can be addressed through targeted construction and aggregation strategies.

From Classification to Localization and Clinical Validation: Large-Scale Development of a Deep Learning System for Thoracic Disease Detection on Chest Radiographs in Thailand

Chest radiography (CXR) remains the most widely used thoracic imaging modality, yet expert interpretation is constrained by a severe shortage of radiologists in Thailand and across Southeast Asia. Local adaptation of deep learning models to Thai data has been shown to substantially improve accuracy on Thai populations. Here we present the development and comprehensive validation of the chest radiograph analysis model in Inspectra CXR version 5, a deep learning system that performs multi-label thoracic disease classification and weakly supervised lesion localization within a single model. The architecture couples a DenseNet-121 backbone with Attend-and-Compare Modules (ACM) and a Probabilistic Class Activation Map (PCAM) aggregation layer, producing a per-condition classification score and heatmap simultaneously. The model was developed on 874,858 frontal chest radiographs with paired radiologist reports from Siriraj Hospital, Bangkok. On a held-out, radiologist-verified in-domain test set of 19,871 cases, it achieved a mean AUROC of 0.994 (mean sensitivity 92.4%, specificity 98.6%) across nine clinically important conditions. On an independent generalization set of 5,992 cases from 13 hospitals across Thailand, the mean AUROC was 0.970, indicating robust transfer across sites. For localization, evaluated on 4,549 radiologist-annotated cases, the model attained a mean lesion-localization fraction (LLF) of 77.9% at 0.59 non-lesion localizations per image. In a usability evaluation with five thoracic radiologists, the system reached a classification concordance of 93.6%, a localization concordance of 94.7%, and a mean System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 89. These results indicate that a locally developed, localization-capable CXR system can deliver high accuracy, generalize across heterogeneous Thai hospitals, and earn the trust of practicing radiologists.

Masked and Predictive Self-Supervised Foundation Models for 3D Brain MRI

Self-supervised foundation models have shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, existing MRI foundation-model studies have primarily emphasized segmentation and dense prediction tasks, while systematic investigation of self-supervised foundation models for MRI-based disease detection remains limited. In this work, we investigate two major self-supervised pretraining paradigms for MRI-based disease detection: reconstruction-based learning via Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and predictive representation learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We study the role of auxiliary objectives by introducing a novel spectral-domain reconstruction loss for MAE to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structure, and by integrating variance--covariance regularization (VCR) within our JEPA framework to encourage decorrelated latent representations. Our models are pretrained on heterogeneous single-contrast MRI volumes in a contrast-agnostic setting, without modality concatenation. Across five downstream disease detection tasks, our results highlight the importance of self-supervised objective design for medical foundation model pretraining, demonstrating that the downstream benefit of each objective is determined by its relevance to the task's structure. Specifically, spectral regularization yields the largest improvements when the downstream discriminative signal is characterized by strong high-frequency anatomical structures, while covariance regularization is most beneficial when discriminative information spans multiple decorrelated feature dimensions. MAE with spectral-domain supervision consistently achieves superior downstream performance for MRI-based disease detection. These findings suggest that self-supervised objectives in medical imaging encode specific biases, and their downstream benefit is fundamentally conditioned on the task's structure.

GourNet: A CNN-Based Model for Mango Leaf Disease Detection

Mango cultivation is crucial in the agricultural sector, significantly contributing to economic development and food security. However, diseases affecting mango leaves can significantly reduce both the production and overall fruit grade. Detecting leaf diseases at an early stage with precision is key to effective disease prevention and sustaining crop productivity. In this paper, we introduce a "deep learning" model named "GourNet", which leverages "Convolutional Neural Networks" to identify infections in mango leaves. We utilize the "MangoLeafBD" (MBD) dataset to train and assess the effectiveness of the presented model. The MBD dataset contains seven disease classes and a Healthy class, making a total of eight classes. To enhance model performance, the images are preprocessed through steps like resizing, rescaling, and data augmentation prior to training. To properly evaluate the model, the dataset is separated into 80% for training, with the remaining 20% equally split between validation and testing. Our model uses only 683,656 total parameters and achieves a classification accuracy of 97%. This research's source code can be found at: https://github.com/ekramalam/GourNet-Repo.