Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Using CNN and Hybrid Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is an eye condition that mainly affects individuals who have diabetes and is one of the important causes of blindness in adults. As the infection progresses, it may lead to permanent loss of vision. Diagnosing diabetic retinopathy manually with the help of an ophthalmologist has been a tedious and a very laborious procedure. This paper not only focuses on diabetic retinopathy detection but also on the analysis of different DR stages, which is performed with the help of Deep Learning (DL) and transfer learning algorithms. CNN, hybrid CNN with ResNet, hybrid CNN with DenseNet are used on a huge dataset with around 3662 train images to automatically detect which stage DR has progressed. Five DR stages, which are 0 (No DR), 1 (Mild DR), 2 (Moderate), 3 (Severe) and 4 (Proliferative DR) are processed in the proposed work. The patient’s eye images are fed as input to the model. The proposed deep learning architectures like CNN, hybrid CNN with ResNet, hybrid CNN with DenseNet 2.1 are used to extract the features of the eye for effective classification. The models achieved an accuracy of 96.22%, 93.18% and 75.61% respectively. The paper concludes with a comparative study of the CNN, hybrid CNN with ResNet, hybrid CNN with DenseNet architectures that highlights hybrid CNN with DenseNet as the perfect deep learning classification model for automated DR detection.