Using Metabolic and Biochemical Indicators to Predict Diabetic Retinopathy by Back-Propagation Artificial Neural Network

PURPOSE: Timely diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) can significantly improve the prognosis of patients. In this study, we established a prediction model by analyzing the relationship between diabetic retinopathy and related metabolic and biochemical indicators. METHODS: A total of 427 type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients were selected from the datadryad website data. Logistic regression (MLR) was used to input layer variables of the model were screened. Then, Tan-Sigmoid was selected as the transfer function of the hidden layer node, and the linear function was used as the output layer function to establish the back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) model. The model was applied to 183 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in our hospital to predict DR. RESULTS: A total of 167 patients (39.2%) with DR were obtained from the Datadryad database. Input variables were screened by MLR model, and it was concluded that the age, sex, albumin and creatinine, diabetes course were independently associated with the occurrence of DR. The above variables were used to establish BP-ANN model. The area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was significantly higher than that of MLR model (0.88 vs 0.74, P<0.05), the probability threshold of the model was 0.3. Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) were selected in our hospital, including 92 patients with DR (50.2%). The above BP-ANN model was used to predict the incidence of DR, and the AUC area was significantly higher than that of the MLR model (0.77 vs 0.70, P<0.05), the probability threshold was 0.7. CONCLUSION: We established the BP-ANN model and applied it to diagnose DR. Taking diabetic course, age, sex, albumin and creatinine as the inputs of BP-ANN, the existence of DR could be well predicted. Meanwhile, the generalization ability of the model could be improved by selecting different probability thresholds in different ROC curves.