Synthetic data-driven diabetic retinopathy diagnosis with explainable AI: a clinically interpretable framework

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a serious complication of Diabetes and leading cause of blindness, demands accurate and early diagnosis. Current diagnostic challenges results from two major limitations: (i) lack of expertly annotated clinical datasets due to privacy and cost factors, and (ii) the nature of deep learning models that limits clinical adoption. This study presents a novel solution combining synthetic data generation with explainable machine learning approach to overcome these challenges.

In the proposed work, synthetic retinal fundus images were generated to simulate the Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) severity grading, enabling the generation of a balanced dataset with 1200 instances. Handcrafted features were retrieved using a pre-processing pipeline consisting of (Hue Saturation Value) HSV color space transformation, GLCM (Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix) based texture analysis, and lesion specific quantification, ensuring clinically relevant feature representation. A Random Forest (RF) classifier optimized with Out of Bag (OOB) validation is implemented for DR severity grading. Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) based Explainability is integrated alongside the classifier to include interpretations of feature importance and decision making patterns.

The proposed framework achieved an accuracy of 94% on synthetic data, outperforming several established deep learning models such as ResNet-50, VGG16 + DenseNet, EfficientNet-B0. Swarm plot analyses revealed that predictions were consistently aligned with better confidence values, and SHAP explanations highlighted the clinically interpretable features such as exudates, validating the reliability of the classifier.

Incorporating the synthetic data with ground truth data through domain adaptation techniques could reduce the performance gaps and improve the transferability in clinical settings.