A Novel Deep Learning Framework for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection

Diabetes is one of the most dangerous diseases that is facing by many people in the world. Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a retinal disease that is caused by the Diabetes Mellitus (DM). DM causes the lesions on the retinal layer thereby affecting the vision. If it is not detected at the initial stages, it might lead to complete blindness and also DR is an irreversible disease. Hence, early detection of DR is inevitable to avoid the vision loss of the patients. Expeditious detection can decrease the complications of the DR thereby vision of the patient is preserved. It is a laborious task for the ophthalmologists to diagnosis DR manually, since it takes a lot more time and cost-effective. Mis-diagnosis might happen if the ophthalmologists are not skillful and experienced in detecting DR from the fundus images. Over the past two decades, deep learning has shown a significant raise in the bio-medical image processing and its niche areas obtaining the best performance. The state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models achieved notable performance in classifying DR, but the severity levels of DR are not analyzed. To address these challenges, we propose a CNN based model that is used to analyze the fundus oculi retinal images to locate the eyeball structure and observe the presence of DR. The proposed model's hyperparameters are regulated by the transfer learning techniques for mapping the label of the images. The dataset used for training and testing the model is taken from the Kaggle that contains the retinal images and its corresponding severity in a scale. Severity level of the images is classified into five different categories from a normal to DR presented eyeball. The accuracy of the proposed model is 94.92%, proving the confident detection and prediction of the DR from the retinal images.