Experimenting Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Using Retinal Images

Along with many complications, diabetic patients have a high chance to suffer from critical level vision loss and in worst case permanent blindness due to Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). Detecting DR in the early stages is a challenge, since it has no visual indication of this disease in its preliminary stage, thus becomes an important task to accomplish in the health sector. Currently, there have been many proposed DR classifier models but there is a lot of room to improve in terms of efficiency and accuracy. Despite having strong computational power, current deep learning algorithm is not able to gain the trust of the medical experts in classifying DR. In this work, we investigate the possibility of classifying DR using deep learning with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We implement preprocessing combined with InceptionV3 and VGG16 models. Experimental results show that InceptionV3 outperforms VGG16. InceptionV3 model achieves an average training accuracy of 73.5 % with a validation accuracy of 68.7%. VGG16 model achieves an average training accuracy of 66.4% with a validation accuracy of 63.13%. The highest training accuracy for InceptionV3 and VGG16 is 79% and 81.2%, respectively. Overall, we achieve an accuracy of 66.6% on 52 images from 3 different classes.