Exploring the Effectiveness of Vision Transformers in Diabetic Retinopathy Identification via Retinal Imaging

Abstract

Vision transformers (ViTs) have begun to be adopted in medical imaging analysis. However, despite their success in other areas of computer vision, ViTs are still largely unexplored in this specific medical imaging task. In this preliminary study, we aim to assess the performance of the ViT in the detection of diabetic retinal retinopathy. In addition, we seek to identify potential avenues for future research and provide insight into the unique challenges and advantages associated with the use of VITs in the context of the identification of diabetes retinal diseases.