Machine Learning Approaches for Detecting Diabetic Retinopathy from Clinical and Public Health Records

Annual eye examinations are recommended for diabetic patients in order to detect diabetic retinopathy and other eye conditions that arise from diabetes. Medically underserved urban communities in the US have annual screening rates that are much lower than the national average and could benefit from informatics approaches to identify unscreened patients most at risk of developing retinopathy.

Using clinical data from urban safety net clinics as well as public health data from the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we examined different machine learning approaches for predicting retinopathy from clinical or public health data. All datasets utilized exhibited a class imbalance.

Classifiers learned on the clinical data were modestly predictive of retinopathy with the best model having an AUC of 0.72, sensitivity of 69.2% and specificity of 55.9%. Classifiers learned on public health data were not predictive of retinopathy.

Successful approaches to detecting latent retinopathy using machine learning could help safety net and other clinics identify unscreened patients who are most at risk of developing retinopathy and the use of ensemble classifiers on clinical data shows promise for this purpose.