DMEgrader: Android Mobile Application for Diabetic Macular Edema Grading Prediction

More than half a billion people worldwide are affected by diabetes, which is a prevalent non-communicable disease that can lead to critical health conditions, including vision loss. Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) is a primary cause of vision impairment and can eventually lead to blindness in diabetic patients. Early detection of DME and proper health management are crucial to controlling the disease. Retinal image-based AI-enabled diabetes diagnosis has gained significant attention as a non-invasive, fast, and reasonably accurate method for diagnosing DME. To make this technology accessible to underserved communities or areas lacking proper clinical facilities, a mobile application-based solution could have a significant impact. In this article, we describe how we transformed our previously published AI-enabled model into an Android-based mobile application, which is part of a two-phase research study. In the first phase, we developed a deep learning-based model that predicts DME grading using retinal images. In the second phase, we built a mobile application DMEgrader to make our model accessible via a mobile device. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to demonstrate necessary steps and code snippets to support developers in transforming deep learning models into Android based mobile applications for DME grading prediction.