Fig. 4

AI flow for diabetic retinopathy. In the diabetic retinopathy screening domain, the AI implementation allows automated diagnosis and subsequent clinical decisions. In the example presented in the figure, the AI system would recommend referring the patient to the eye clinic because of the referable diagnosis for diabetic retinopathy. To allow researchers and clinicians determine how the AI model makes the decision, the heatmap attempts to display the contribution of each image pixel or region, to the final classification. Heatmaps open the ‘black box’ highlighting the areas in which the AI system is focusing on to build trust among practitioners and patients. Abbreviations: DR; diabetic retinopathy; NPDR: non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy; PDR: proliferative diabetic retinopathy