Task-Specific Quality Gating for Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography B-Scans: Learned Representations Over Scalar Metrics in Choroid Segmentation
Two retinal foundation models produce quality-aligned clusters that exceed a patient-level permutation null, while NR-IQA and general-purpose pretrained feature spaces do not, suggesting that domain-specific pretraining provides an additional benefit beyond general-purpose learned representations.