A Machine Learning Approach for the Diagnosis of Diabetes : A Review
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease that affects 382 million patients’ worldwide (2013 data) and is predicted to increase to as many as 592 million adults by 2035. DM is one of the major causes of blindness in young adults around the world. The most serious ocular complication of DM is diabetic retinopathy (DR).Diabetic retinopathy is the most common microvascular complication in diabetes1, for the screening of which the retinal imaging is the most widely used method due to its high sensitivity in detecting retinopathy. Prompt diagnosis is important through efficient screening. The evaluation of the severity and degree of retinopathy associated with a person having diabetes is currently performed by medical experts based on the fundus or retinal images of the patient’s eyes As the number of patients with diabetes is rapidly increasing, the number of retinal images produced by the screening programmes will also increase, which in turn introduces a large labor-intensive burden on the medical experts as well as cost to the healthcare services. Manual grading of these images to determine the severity of DR is rather slow and resource demanding. This could be alleviated with an automated system either as support for medical experts’ work or as full diagnosis tool. This labor-intensive task could greatly benefit from automatic detection using machine learning technique. Early detection and timely treatment have been shown to prevent visual loss and blindness in patients with retinal complications of diabetes. Machine learning in recent years has been the evolving, reliable and supporting tools in medical domain and has provided the greatest support for predicting disease with correct case of training and testing. The objective of this paper is to explore the work happening on the detection, progression and feature selection process for the prediction of DR and to establish the extent and depth of existing knowledge on RD prediction process.