Diabetic retinopathy classification using deep convolutional neural network

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a diabetic impairment that affects the eyes and if not treated could lead to permanent vision impairment. Traditionally, Ophthalmologists perform diagnosis of DR by checking for existence and any seriousness of some subtle features in the fundus images. This process is not very efficient as it takes a lot of time and resources. DR testing of all the patients, a lot of which are undiagnosed or untreated, is a big task due to the inefficiency of the traditional method. This paper was written with the aim to propose a classification system based on an efficient deep convolution neural network (DCNN) model which is computationally efficient. Amongst other supervised algorithms involved, proposed solution is to find a way to efficiently classify the fundus images into 5 different levels of severity. Application of segmentation after the pre-processing and then use of deep convolutional neural networks on the dataset results in a high accuracy of 91.52%. The result achieved is high given the limitations of the dataset and computational powers.