Predicting 1, 2 and 3 year emergent referable diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy using deep learning

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Abstract

Background
Predicting diabetic retinopathy (DR) progression could enable individualised screening with prompt referral for high-risk individuals for sight-saving treatment, whilst reducing screening burden for low-risk individuals. We developed and validated deep learning systems (DLS) that predict 1, 2 and 3 year emergent referable DR and maculopathy using risk factor characteristics (tabular DLS), colour fundal photographs (image DLS) or both (multimodal DLS).

Methods
From 162,339 development-set eyes from south-east London (UK) diabetic eye screening programme (DESP), 110,837 had eligible longitudinal data, with the remaining 51,502 used for pretraining. Internal and external (Birmingham DESP, UK) test datasets included 27,996, and 6,928 eyes respectively.

Results
Internal multimodal DLS emergent referable DR, maculopathy or either area-under-the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) were 0.95 (95% CI: 0.92-0.98), 0.84 (0.82-0.86), 0.85 (0.83-0.87) for 1 year, 0.92 (0.87-0.96), 0.84 (0.82-0.87), 0.85 (0.82-0.87) for 2 years, and 0.85 (0.80-0.90), 0.79 (0.76-0.82), 0.79 (0.76-0.82) for 3 years. External multimodal DLS emergent referable DR, maculopathy or either AUROC were 0.93 (0.88-0.97), 0.85 (0.80-0.89), 0.85 (0.76-0.85) for 1 year, 0.93 (0.89-0.97), 0.79 (0.74-0.84), 0.80 (0.76-0.85) for 2 years, and 0.91 (0.84-0.98), 0.79 (0.74-0.83), 0.79 (0.74-0.84) for 3 years.

Conclusions
Multimodal and image DLS performance is significantly better than tabular DLS at all intervals. DLS accurately predict 1, 2 and 3 year emergent referable DR and referable maculopathy using colour fundal photographs, with additional risk factor characteristics conferring improvements in prognostic performance. Proposed DLS are a step towards individualised risk-based screening, whereby AI-assistance allows high-risk individuals to be closely monitored while reducing screening burden for low-risk individuals.
Original languageEnglish
Article number167
JournalCommunications Medicine
Volume4
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 Aug 2024

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