Diabetic Retinopathy Grading From Color Fundus Images: An Autotuned Deep Learning Approach

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a consequence of long-term diabetes which affects the eyes. It causes affliction to the veins in the eyes causing raptures on the retina which can impact vision. If the condition is failed to be detected at an early stage, it can lead to complete vision loss. The conventional diagnosing cycle of DR using fundus images requires very skilled practitioners due to the minute nature of features of the anomalies which can even lead to misdiagnosis and is time consuming. Therefore, devising an automated method for the diagnosis of DR can assist individuals with diabetes to identify symptoms of DR at a very early stage. This research also encompasses the classification of the detected images into its corresponding 3 stages namely No Diabetic Retinopathy (No DR), Non-Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (NPDR) and Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (PDR) that can greatly aid in monitoring the dynamics of the key features including lesions, hemorrhages, and density of blood vessels. Deep learning algorithms has gotten to become a well-known method that can accomplish a wide variety of classification tasks. However, most of these methods are only efficient in classifying the various stages of DR with low accuracies notably, for the early stages. The devised algorithm in this research uses enriched images processing techniques, automatic hyperparameter tuning and neural network training strategies to provide more emphasis on the minute features for better prediction. The algorithm was tested and compared with modified Resnet50, VGG16, Mobilenetv2, Inceptionv3 and InceptionResnetv2 which gave a classification accuracy of 94.7%, 86.1%, 85.8%, 85.3% and 87% respectively with corresponding detection accuracies of 99.8%, 94%, 94.2%, 94.9% and 98.2% respectively on a test set of 508 images. Using the proposed algorithm, the results indicate Resnet50 based network gave superior performance for both detection and classification tasks.