Capillary Dataset: A Dataset of Nail-fold Capillaries Captured by Microscopy for Diabetes Detection

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic condition marked by insufficient insulin utilization or production, causing metabolic dysregulation. If not controlled, it can cause serious complications that affect major organ systems such as the cardiovascular and ocular systems. Early diagnosis is essential for timely interventions to ensure effective glycemic control and lower the risk of complications. The present study introduced a robust and comprehensive dataset derived from nail-fold capillaroscopy. This dataset, which includes imaging and some video data from 126 individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) alongside 76 healthy controls, consisted of 3283 images obtained from diabetic subjects and 3412 images from non-diabetic participants. All images were acquired at 390× high magnification with a high resolution of 640×480 pixels, including corresponding video data, ensuring a thorough and detailed dataset for our study. The dataset was organized into two analytical tracks. The first track focused on nail-fold morphology, classifying images into four types: hairpin, crossing, tortuous, and bushy. After filtering out duplicates and low-quality images, 1279 images were selected for analysis. The second track involved binary classification for the detection of diabetes, differentiating healthy individuals from people with diabetes. This utilized the complete dataset and the augmented versions created by combining multiple images into composite formats to enhance feature representation. Additionally, we evaluated several benchmark deep-learning models such as Vision Transformers (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for morphological classification and diabetes detection tasks. This analysis illuminated current model performance, highlighted challenges, and paved the way for future research opportunities. Importantly, this dataset is critical and holds significant potential for advancing non-invasive automated diagnostic methodologies in diabetes-related nail-fold capillary research, offering a promising future for diabetes research. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HanaNguyen/Capillary-Dataset. The github: https://github.com/urgonguyen/Capillarydataset.git.