A Transfer Learning Approach for Diabetic Retinopathy and Diabetic Macular Edema Severity Grading

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) are complication that occurs in diabetic patient especially among working age group that leads to vision impairment problem and sometimes even permanent blindness. Early detection is very much needed for diagnosis and to reduce blindness or deterioration. The diagnosis phase of DR consumes more time, effort and cost when manually performed by ophthalmologists and more chances of misdiagnosis still there. Research community is working on to design computer aided diagnosis system for prior detection and for DR grading based on its severity. Ongoing researches in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have set out the advancement of deep learning technique which comes as a best technique to perform analysis and classification of medical images. In this paper, research is applied on Resnet50 model for classification of DR and DME based on its severity grading on public benchmark dataset. Transfer learning approach accomplishes the best outcome on Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD).