Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a major vision-threatening complication of diabetes that requires accurate and early diagnosis to prevent irreversible retinal damage. Conventional image-based diagnostic systems often struggle with complex retinal variations, including microvascular abnormalities, lesion diversity, and differences in disease severity. Recent advancements in deep learning have demonstrated significant potential for automated DR analysis; however, existing approaches frequently face limitations in feature representation, generalization capability, and the integration of local and global retinal characteristics. This research proposes a Hybrid Deep Vision Framework for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Using ResNet-ViT Feature Fusion, combining convolutional feature extraction capabilities of Residual Networks (ResNet) with the global contextual modeling strength of Vision Transformers (ViT). The proposed framework utilizes complementary feature learning, where ResNet captures fine-grained retinal structures while ViT enhances long-range dependency modeling across image regions. The study is positioned within modern intelligent medical imaging systems that require scalable, accurate, and computationally efficient classification mechanisms. Existing research on hybrid neural networks, segmentation-assisted analysis, transformer-based classification, and optimized transfer learning demonstrates the importance of integrating multiple learning paradigms for improved DR recognition. The proposed framework addresses these gaps by introducing a feature fusion strategy capable of improving representation diversity and classification robustness. The findings indicate that hybrid deep vision architectures provide a promising direction for automated retinal screening systems, although challenges related to computational complexity, dataset variability, and clinical deployment remain important considerations.
