A review of diseases of the retina for neurologists

Deep CNN with Hybrid Binary Local Search and Particle Swarm Optimizer for Exudates Classification from Fundus Images

Diabetic retinopathy is a chronic condition that causes vision loss if not detected early. In the early stage, it can be diagnosed with the aid of exudates which are called lesions. However, it is arduous to detect the exudate lesion due to the availability of blood vessels and other distractions. To tackle these issues, we proposed a novel exudates classification from the fundus image known as hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN)-based binary local search optimizer-based particle swarm optimization algorithm. The proposed method from this paper exploits image augmentation to enlarge the fundus image to the required size without losing any features. The features from the resized fundus images are extracted as a feature vector and fed into the feed-forward CNN as the input. Henceforth, it classifies the exudates from the fundus image. Further, the hyperparameters are optimized to reduce the computational complexities by utilization of binary local search optimizer (BLSO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The experimental analysis is conducted on the public ROC and real-time ARA400 datasets and compared with the state-of-art works such as support vector machine classifiers, multi-modal/multi-scale, random forest, and CNN for the performance metrics. The classification accuracy is high for the proposed work, and thus, our proposed outperforms all the other approaches.

Potential of Long Non-Coding RNAs in Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual impairment in the aging population with poorly known pathogenesis and lack of effective treatment. Age and family history are the strongest AMD risk factors, and several loci were identified to contribute to AMD. Recently, also the epigenetic profile was associated with AMD, and some long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) were shown to involve in AMD pathogenesis. The Vax2os1/2 (ventral anterior homeobox 2 opposite strand isoform 1) lncRNAs may modulate the balance between pro- and anti-angiogenic factors in the eye contributing to wet AMD. The stress-induced dedifferentiation of retinal pigment epithelium cells can be inhibited by the ZNF503-AS1 (zinc finger protein 503 antisense RNA 2) and LINC00167 lncRNAs. Overexpression of the PWRN2 (Prader-Willi region non-protein-coding RNA 2) lncRNA aggravated RPE cells apoptosis and mitochondrial impairment induced by oxidative stress. Several other lncRNAs were reported to exert protective or detrimental effects in AMD. However, many studies are limited to an association between lncRNA and AMD in patients or model systems with bioinformatics. Therefore, further works on lncRNAs in AMD are rational, and they should be enriched with mechanistic and clinical studies to validate conclusions obtained in high-throughput in vitro research.