DDLA: a double deep latent autoencoder for diabetic retinopathy diagnose based on continuous glucose sensors

The current diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy is based on fundus images and clinical experience. However, considering the ineffectiveness and non-portability of medical devices, we aimed to develop a diagnostic model for diabetic retinopathy based on glucose series data from the wearable continuous glucose monitoring system. Therefore, this study developed a novel method, i.e., double deep latent autoencoder, for exploring glycemic variability influence from multi-day glucose data for diabetic retinopathy. Specifically, the model proposed in this research could encode continuous glucose sensor data with non-continuous and variable length via the integration of a data reorganization module and a novel encoding module with fragmented-missing-wise objective function. Additionally, the model implements a double deep autoencoder, which integrated convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, to jointly capturing the inter-day and intra-day glucose latent features from glucose series. The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated through a cross-validation method to clinical datasets of 765 type 2 diabetes patients. The proposed method achieves the highest accuracy value (0.89), precision value (0.88), and F1 score (0.73). The results suggest that our model can be used to remotely diagnose and screen for diabetic retinopathy by learning potential features of glucose series data collected by wearable continuous glucose monitoring systems. Graphical Abstract