Deep Learning Approaches for Retinal Disease Identification in Fundus Imaging: A Comprehensive Overview

Vision impairment is becoming a major health concern, especially in elderly people. While in the medical field, manually detecting ocular pathology has significant difficulty. Therefore, deep learning diagnostic techniques are widely used for identifying eye diseases and play a crucial role in diagnosing vision-related problems. Examination of fundoscopy allows for analyzing eyes for diagnosis of eye diseases, including Diabetic retinopathy (DR), Cataracts, Glaucoma, Age‑related macular degeneration, Pathologic Myopia, and more. In this paper, we propose a concise review of introducing most of the DL, hybrid, and ensemble models utilized for the purpose of identification and classification of eye diseases. Various datasets, feature extraction techniques, and metrics for performance evaluation are discussed. The chosen papers come from conferences and scholarly publications published from 2019 to 2024. We evaluate the performance of chosen researches using different datasets, the most common ones include ocular disease intelligent recognition, Indian DR image dataset, EyePACS, methods to evaluate segmentation and indexing techniques in the field of retinal ophthalmology, methods to evaluate segmentation and indexing techniques in the field of retinal ophthalmology-version 2, DIARETDB, Structured analysis of the retina, high-resolution fundus, digital retinal images for vessel extraction, online retinal fundus image dataset for Gl analysis and research, retinal fundus multi-disease image dataset and Kaggle datasets. The detection studies that have been reviewed show that the accuracy of these approaches varies between 73% and 99%, the sensitivity ranges from 69% to 99% and precision is between 89% and 99%. The results show that great accuracy is consistently achieved with DL algorithms compared to traditional Machine learning approaches. However, there are still some challenges and limitations remaining including excessive resource consumption and over-fitting due to dataset size and diversity issues. This review offers useful insight for researchers and healthcare professionals to comprehend AI technologies properly for the detection, classification, and diagnosis of retinal diseases. We succinctly summarize the methodologies of all the chosen studies and focus on the elements that define the aim of the studies.