Deep Learning Techniques for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification: A Survey

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a degenerative disease that impacts the eyes and is a consequence of Diabetes mellitus, where high blood glucose levels induce lesions on the eye retina. Diabetic Retinopathy is regarded as the leading cause of blindness for diabetic patients, especially the working-age population in developing nations. Treatment involves sustaining the patient’s current grade of vision since the disease is irreversible. Early detection of Diabetic Retinopathy is crucial in order to sustain the patient’s vision effectively. The main issue involved with DR detection is that the manual diagnosis process is very time, money, and effort consuming and involves an ophthalmologist’s examination of eye retinal fundus images. The latter also proves to be more difficult, particularly in the early stages of the disease when disease features are less prominent in the images. Machine learning-based medical image analysis has proven competency in assessing retinal fundus images, and the utilization of deep learning algorithms has aided the early diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). This paper reviews and analyzes state-of-the-art deep learning methods in supervised, self-supervised, and Vision Transformer setups, proposing retinal fundus image classification and detection. For instance, referable, non-referable, and proliferative classifications of Diabetic Retinopathy are reviewed and summarized. Moreover, the paper discusses the available retinal fundus datasets for Diabetic Retinopathy that are used for tasks such as detection, classification, and segmentation. The paper also assesses research gaps in the area of DR detection/classification and addresses various challenges that need further study and investigation.