Diabetic Retinopathy is the most prevalent cause of avoidable vision impairment, mainly affecting the working-age population in the world. Recent research has given a better understanding of the requirement in clinical eye care practice to identify better and cheaper ways of identification, management, diagnosis and treatment of retinal disease. The importance of diabetic retinopathy screening programs and difficulty in achieving reliable early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy at a reasonable cost needs attention to develop computer-aided diagnosis tool. Computer-aided disease diagnosis in retinal image analysis could ease mass screening of populations with diabetes mellitus and help clinicians in utilizing their time more efficiently. The recent technological advances in computing power, communication systems, and machine learning techniques provide opportunities to the biomedical engineers and computer scientists to meet the requirements of clinical practice. Diverse and representative retinal image sets are essential for developing and testing digital screening programs and the automated algorithms at their core. To the best of our knowledge, IDRiD (Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset), is the first database representative of an Indian population. It constitutes typical diabetic retinopathy lesions and normal retinal structures annotated at a pixel level. The dataset provides information on the disease severity of diabetic retinopathy, and diabetic macular edema for each image. This makes it perfect for development and evaluation of image analysis algorithms for early detection of diabetic retinopathy.

The world faces difficulties in terms of eye care, including treatment, quality of prevention, vision rehabilitation services, and scarcity of trained eye care experts. Early detection and diagnosis of ocular pathologies would enable forestall of visual impairment. One challenge that limits the adoption of computer-aided diagnosis tool by ophthalmologists is the number of sight-threatening rare pathologies, such as central retinal artery occlusion or anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, and others are usually ignored. In the past two decades, many publicly available datasets of color fundus images have been collected with a primary focus on diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration and few other frequent pathologies. To enable development of methods for automatic ocular disease classification of frequent diseases along with the rare pathologies, we have created a new Retinal Fundus Multi-disease Image Dataset (RFMiD). It consists of 3200 fundus images captured using three different fundus cameras with 46 conditions annotated through adjudicated consensus of two senior retinal experts. To the best of our knowledge, our dataset, RFMiD, is the only publicly available dataset that constitutes such a wide variety of diseases that appear in routine clinical settings. This dataset will enable the development of generalizable models for retinal screening.

Irreversible vision loss is a worldwide threat. Developing a computer-aided diagnosis system to detect retinal fundus diseases is extremely useful and serviceable to ophthalmologists. Early detection, diagnosis, and correct treatment could save the eye’s vision. Nevertheless, an eye may be afflicted with several diseases if proper care is not taken. A single retinal fundus image might be linked to one or more diseases. Age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, Glaucoma, and uncorrected refractive errors are the leading causes of visual impairment. Our research team at the center of excellence lab has generated a new dataset called the Retinal Fundus Multi-Disease Image Dataset 2.0 (RFMiD2.0). This dataset includes around 860 retinal fundus images, annotated by three eye specialists, and is a multiclass, multilabel dataset. We gathered images from a research facility in Jalna and Nanded, where patients across Maharashtra come for preventative and therapeutic eye care. Our dataset would be the second publicly available dataset consisting of the most frequent diseases, along with some rarely identified diseases. This dataset is auxiliary to the previously published RFMiD dataset. This dataset would be significant for the research and development of artificial intelligence in ophthalmology.

Acute cerebral stroke is a leading cause of disability and death, which could be reduced with a prompt diagnosis during patient transportation to the hospital. A portable retina imaging system could enable this by measuring vascular information and blood perfusion in the retina and, due to the homology between retinal and cerebral vessels, infer if a cerebral stroke is underway. However, the feasibility of this strategy, the imaging features, and retina imaging modalities to do this are not clear. In this work, we show initial evidence of the feasibility of this approach by training machine learning models using feature engineering and self-supervised learning retina features extracted from OCT-A and fundus images to classify controls and acute stroke patients. Models based on macular microvasculature density features achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.87–0.88. Self-supervised deep learning models were able to generate features resulting in AUCs ranging from 0.66 to 0.81. While further work is needed for the final proof for a diagnostic system, these results indicate that microvasculature density features from OCT-A images have the potential to be used to diagnose acute cerebral stroke from the retina.