Artificial intelligence use in diabetes

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) affects the small vessels of the eye and is the leading cause of blindness in people on reproductive age; however, less than half of patients are aware of their condition; therefore, early detection and treatment is essential to combat it. There are currently multiple technologies for DR detection, some of which are already commercially available. To understand how these technologies work, we must know first some basic concepts about artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). ML is the basic process by which AI incorporates new data using different algorithms and thus creates new knowledge on its base, learns from it, and makes determinations and predictions on some subject based on all that information. AI can be presented at various levels. DL is a specific type of ML, which trains a computer to perform tasks as humans do, such as speech recognition, image identification, or making predictions. DL has shown promising diagnostic performance in image recognition, being widely adopted in many domains, including medicine. For general image analysis, it has achieved strong results in various medical specialties such as radiology dermatology and in particular for ophthalmology. We will review how this technology is constantly evolving which are the available systems and their task in real world as well as the several challenges, such as medicolegal implications, ethics, and clinical deployment model needed to accelerate the translation of these new algorithms technologies into the global health-care environment.