Heavyweight contender Daniel Dubois will be out for five months as he recovers from an eye injury suffered on Saturday night.

Dubois' left eye sustained damage during his stoppage loss to Olympic silver medal winner Joe Joyce in their high-stakes contest.

The left eye began to swell up early on, from the pounding of Joyce's stiff jabs, and by the tenth the eye was nearly shut.

During the tenth round, he was hit directly on the left eye - which prompted him to voluntarily take a knee. Dubois allowed the referee to count him out.

In the aftermath, it was revealed that Dubois had sustained a fractured orbital bone and nerve damage.

According to a recent report by The Sun, the 23-year-old fighter also suffered a bleed on the retina.

The paper indicates that Dubois will be out of action for at least five months.

Once the swelling on the eye is reduced, the area will have a more accurate examination where a doctor will determine if surgery is required.

Ricardo Mohammed-Ali, the surgeon who twice operated on Kell Brook to fix his fractured orbital bones, felt Dubois could have suffered a career-ending injury had he continued with the fight.

"As someone who's fixed a lot of orbits, I'd say that it would be safe to discontinue if there's a suspicion that there's a fracture or risk of visual loss. It definitely could be a career-ending injury. If the orbit is fractured and the eye moves back, if they receive more blows… it can actually drop down into the sinus," Mohammed-Ali told Daily Mail.

"So further damage to the orbit, making the defect even bigger and harder to reconstruct and restore to some sort of function that a professional athlete would require."