Diabetic Retinopathy Progression Prediction Using a Deep Learning Model

Diabetes is an illness that happens with a high level of glucose in the body, and can harm the retina, causing permanent loss vision or diabetic retinopathy. The fundus oculi method comprises detecting the eyes to perform a pathology test. In this research, we implement a method to predict the progress of diabetic retinopathy. There is a research gap that exists for the detection of diabetic retinopathy progression employing deep learning models. Therefore, in this research, we introduce a recurrent CNN (R-CNN) model to detect upcoming visual field inspections to predict diabetic retinopathy progression. A benchmark dataset of 7000 eyes from healthy and diabetic retinopathy progress cases over the years are utilized in this research. Approximately 80% of ocular cases from the dataset is utilized for the training stage, 10% of cases are used for validation, and 10% are used for testing. Six successive visual field tests are used as input and the seventh test is compared with the output of the R-CNN. The precision of the R-CNN is compared with the regression model and the Hidden Markov (HMM) method. The average prediction precision of the R-CNN is considerably greater than both regression and HMM. In the pointwise classification, R-CNN depicts the least classification mean square error among the compared models in most of the tests. Also, R-CNN is found to be the minimum model affected by the deterioration of reliability and diabetic retinopathy severity. Correctly predicting a progressive visual field test with the R-CNN model can aid physicians in making decisions concerning diabetic retinopathy.