A Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Diabetic Retinopathy

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that diabetic retinopathy affects one-third of diabetics, regardless of their stage of the disease. Several research efforts are focused on its automated detection and diagnosis. Identifying diabetic retinopathy is crucial due to the damage that occurs to the blood vessels of the eye retina, leading to vision blur or even complete blindness. Thus, an annual checkup is needed for people with diabetes. Moreover, uncontrolled sugar levels for diabetes patients could worsen the current stage of diabetic retinopathy. Consequently, automated detection can greatly contribute to the treatment of disease. This can be carried out through several algorithms, including deep learning models and support vector machines, in addition to transfer learning. This contribution proposes a new approach for diabetic retinopathy automated detection based on convolutional neural network (CNN) models. The proposed model provides both binary and multi-class detection. Both scenarios have shown promising results, where the training accuracies of both the binary classification and the multi-class are 92% and 94%, respectively.