From Canon to Nikon: Camera Domain Shift and Potential Equity Implications in Retinal AI

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of preventable blindness, yet access to regular screening remains limited worldwide. AI offers a scalable approach, but its performance can be sensitive to image quality and acquisition conditions. In a Brazilian cohort of 8,524 patients, retinal images acquired with the Nikon NF5050 were more than twice as likely to have inadequate image quality compared with those acquired with the Canon CR-2, despite refurbished Canon systems costing more than twice as much as Nikon systems. This potential cost–quality trade-off highlights an important consideration for the reliability of AI systems deployed across heterogeneous imaging systems. Using a frozen pretrained retinal foundation model, we systematically evaluate whether camera-associated performance differences persist across 12 retinal disease classification tasks, four input resolutions, and five downstream classifiers. We find that camera-associated performance differences vary substantially across tasks, and that neither higher input resolution nor classifier choice consistently mitigates cross-camera variation. These findings identify camera platform as a potentially overlooked source of performance variability, with implications for the safety and reliability of retinal AI when deployed across heterogeneous imaging systems. We release all source code, evaluation scripts, and per-task results on GitHub to support reproducible benchmarking.