Multimodal Deep Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy: A Survey

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) remains a leading cause of blindness globally, driving the rapid development of automated diagnostic systems leveraging deep learning. Recent research demonstrates that multimodal deep learning models that integrate retinal images, electronic health records (EHR), and clinical text data can surpass single-modality approaches in DR screening accuracy. In this survey, we systematically review advances from the last 3 years, highlighting key models and methodologies, as well as datasets and evaluation metrics. We find multimodal approaches consistently outperform single-modality models, and often by a clear margin, and identify data scarcity, domain adaptation, and interpretability as the three main hurdles ahead.