Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) affects individuals with long-term diabetes. Without early diagnosis, DR can lead to vision loss. Fundus photography captures the structure of the retina along with abnormalities indicative of the stage of the disease. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support clinicians in identifying these lesions, reducing manual workload, but models require high-quality annotated datasets. Due to the complexity of retinal structures, errors in image acquisition and lesion interpretation of manual annotators can occur. We proposed a quality-control framework, ensuring only high-standard data is used for evaluation and AI training. First, an explainable feature-based classifier is used to filter inadequate images. The features are extracted both using image processing and contrastive learning. Then, the images are enhanced and put subject to annotation, using deep-learning-based assistance. Lastly, the agreement between annotators calculated using derived formulas determines the usability of the annotations.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading plays a critical role in early clinical intervention and vision preservation. Recent explorations predominantly focus on visual lesion feature extraction through data processing and domain decoupling strategies. However, they generally overlook domain-invariant pathological patterns and underutilize the rich contextual knowledge of foundation models, relying solely on visual information, which is insufficient for distinguishing subtle pathological variations. Therefore, we propose integrating fine-grained pathological descriptions to complement prototypes with additional context, thereby resolving ambiguities in borderline cases. Specifically, we propose a Hierarchical Anchor Prototype Modulation (HAPM) framework to facilitate DR grading. First, we introduce a variance spectrum-driven anchor prototype library that preserves domain-invariant pathological patterns. We further employ a hierarchical differential prompt gating mechanism, dynamically selecting discriminative semantic prompts from both LVLM and LLM sources to address semantic confusion between adjacent DR grades. Finally, we utilize a two-stage prototype modulation strategy that progressively integrates clinical knowledge into visual prototypes through a Pathological Semantic Injector (PSI) and a Discriminative Prototype Enhancer (DPE). Extensive experiments across eight public datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves pathology-guided prototype evolution while outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/HAPM.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) remains a leading cause of preventable blindness, with early detection critical for reducing vision loss worldwide. Over the past decade, deep learning has transformed DR screening, progressing from early convolutional neural networks trained on private datasets to advanced pipelines addressing class imbalance, label scarcity, domain shift, and interpretability. This survey provides the first systematic synthesis of DR research spanning 2016-2025, consolidating results from 50+ studies and over 20 datasets. We critically examine methodological advances, including self- and semi-supervised learning, domain generalization, federated training, and hybrid neuro-symbolic models, alongside evaluation protocols, reporting standards, and reproducibility challenges. Benchmark tables contextualize performance across datasets, while discussion highlights open gaps in multi-center validation and clinical trust. By linking technical progress with translational barriers, this work outlines a practical agenda for reproducible, privacy-preserving, and clinically deployable DR AI. Beyond DR, many of the surveyed innovations extend broadly to medical imaging at scale.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a vision-threatening complication of Dia-betes Mellitus (DM), is a major global concern, particularly in India, which has one of the highest diabetic populations. Prolonged hyperglycemia damages reti-nal microvasculature, leading to DR symptoms like microaneurysms, hemor-rhages, and fluid leakage, which, if undetected, cause irreversible vision loss. Therefore, early screening is crucial as DR is asymptomatic in its initial stages. Fundus imaging aids precise diagnosis by detecting subtle retinal lesions. This paper introduces a hybrid diagnostic framework combining traditional feature extraction and deep learning (DL) to enhance DR detection. While handcrafted features capture key clinical markers, DL automates hierarchical pattern recog-nition, improving early diagnosis. The model synergizes interpretable clinical data with learned features, surpassing standalone DL approaches that demon-strate superior classification and reduce false negatives. This multimodal AI-driven approach enables scalable, accurate DR screening, crucial for diabetes-burdened regions.

Preprint Note: This is the author preprint version of a paper accepted for presentation at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2025. The final version will appear in the official proceedings. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of blindness in working-age adults, and current diagnostic methods rely on resource-intensive eye exams and specialized equipment. Image-based AI tools have shown limitations in early-stage detection, motivating the need for alternative approaches. We propose a non-image-based, two-level ensemble model for DR prediction using routine laboratory test results. In the first stage, base models (Linear SVC, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and XGBoost) are hyperparameter tuned and internally stacked across different configurations to optimize metrics such as accuracy, recall, and precision. In the second stage, predictions are aggregated using Random Forest as a meta-learner. This hierarchical stacking strategy improves generalization, balances performance across multiple metrics, and remains computationally efficient compared to deep learning approaches. The model achieved Accuracy 0.9433, F1 Score 0.9425, Recall 0.9207, Precision 0.9653, ROC-AUC 0.9844, and AUPRC 0.9875, surpassing one-level stacking and FCN baselines. These results highlight the model potential for accurate and interpretable DR risk prediction in clinical settings.

Diabetic retinopathy grading is inherently ordinal and long-tailed, with minority stages being scarce, heterogeneous, and clinically critical to detect accurately. Conventional methods often rely on isotropic Gaussian priors and symmetric loss functions, misaligning latent representations with the task's asymmetric nature. We propose the Constrained Asymmetric Prior Wasserstein Autoencoder (CAP-WAE), a novel framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations. Our approach employs a Wasserstein Autoencoder (WAE) that aligns its aggregate posterior with a asymmetric prior, preserving the heavy-tailed and skewed structure of minority classes. The latent space is further structured by a Margin-Aware Orthogonality and Compactness (MAOC) loss to ensure grade-ordered separability. At the supervision level, we introduce a direction-aware ordinal loss, where a lightweight head predicts asymmetric dispersions to generate soft labels that reflect clinical priorities by penalizing under-grading more severely. Stabilized by an adaptive multi-task weighting scheme, our end-to-end model requires minimal tuning. Across public DR benchmarks, CAP-WAE consistently achieves state-of-the-art Quadratic Weighted Kappa, accuracy, and macro-F1, surpassing both ordinal classification and latent generative baselines. t-SNE visualizations further reveal that our method reshapes the latent manifold into compact, grade-ordered clusters with reduced overlap.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of blindness worldwide, and AI systems can expand access to fundus photography screening. Current FDA-cleared systems primarily provide binary referral outputs, where this minimal output may limit clinical trust and utility. Yet, determining the most effective output format to enhance clinician-AI performance is an empirical challenge that is difficult to assess at scale. We evaluated multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for DR detection and their ability to simulate clinical AI assistance across different output types. Two models were tested on IDRiD and Messidor-2: GPT-4o, a general-purpose MLLM, and MedGemma, an open-source medical model. Experiments included: (1) baseline evaluation, (2) simulated AI assistance with synthetic predictions, and (3) actual AI-to-AI collaboration where GPT-4o incorporated MedGemma outputs. MedGemma outperformed GPT-4o at baseline, achieving higher sensitivity and AUROC, while GPT-4o showed near-perfect specificity but low sensitivity. Both models adjusted predictions based on simulated AI inputs, but GPT-4o's performance collapsed with incorrect ones, whereas MedGemma remained more stable. In actual collaboration, GPT-4o achieved strong results when guided by MedGemma's descriptive outputs, even without direct image access (AUROC up to 0.96). These findings suggest MLLMs may improve DR screening pipelines and serve as scalable simulators for studying clinical AI assistance across varying output configurations. Open, lightweight models such as MedGemma may be especially valuable in low-resource settings, while descriptive outputs could enhance explainability and clinician trust in clinical workflows.

Ophthalmic diseases pose a significant global health burden. However, traditional diagnostic methods and existing monocular image-based deep learning approaches often overlook the pathological correlations between the two eyes. In practical medical robotic diagnostic scenarios, paired retinal images (binocular fundus images) are frequently required as diagnostic evidence. To address this, we propose DMS-Net-a dual-modal multi-scale siamese network for binocular retinal image classification. The framework employs a weight-sharing siamese ResNet-152 architecture to concurrently extract deep semantic features from bilateral fundus images. To tackle challenges like indistinct lesion boundaries and diffuse pathological distributions, we introduce the OmniPool Spatial Integrator Module (OSIM), which achieves multi-resolution feature aggregation through multi-scale adaptive pooling and spatial attention mechanisms. Furthermore, the Calibrated Analogous Semantic Fusion Module (CASFM) leverages spatial-semantic recalibration and bidirectional attention mechanisms to enhance cross-modal interaction, aggregating modality-agnostic representations of fundus structures. To fully exploit the differential semantic information of lesions present in bilateral fundus features, we introduce the Cross-Modal Contrastive Alignment Module (CCAM). Additionally, to enhance the aggregation of lesion-correlated semantic information, we introduce the Cross-Modal Integrative Alignment Module (CIAM). Evaluation on the ODIR-5K dataset demonstrates that DMS-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 82.9%, recall of 84.5%, and a Cohen's kappa coefficient of 83.2%, showcasing robust capacity in detecting symmetrical pathologies and improving clinical decision-making for ocular diseases. Code and the processed dataset will be released subsequently.