Nowadays, artificial intelligence applications invade all of the fields including medical applications field. Deep learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, in particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), have quickly become the first choice for processing and analyzing medical images due to its performance and effectiveness. Diabetic retinopathy is a vision loss disease that infects people with diabetes. This disease damages the blood vessels in the retina, hence, leads to blindness. Due to the sensitivity and complications involved in managing diabetics, designing and developing automated systems to detect and grade diabetic retinopathy is considered one of the recent research areas in the world of medical image applications. In this paper, the aspects of deep learning field related to diabetic retinopathy have been discussed. Various concepts in deep learning including traditional Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm, ANN drawbacks in context of computer vision and image processing applications, and the best algorithm to overcome ANN drawbacks, CNN, have been elucidated along with the architecture. The paper also reviews an extensive summary of some works in the current research trend and future applications of the DL algorithms in medical image analysis for DR detection and grading. Furthermore, various research gabs related to building such automated systems for medical image analysis have been conferred – such as imbalance dataset which is considered one of the main performance issues that should be handled, the need of high performance computational resources to train deep and efficient models and others. This is quite beneficial for researchers working in the domain of medical image analysis to handle DR.
Artificial intelligence using deep learning to screen for referable and vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy in Africa: a clinical validation study