Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy using Convolutional Neural Networks for Feature Extraction and Classification (DRFEC)

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is caused as a result of Diabetes Mellitus which causes development of various retinal abrasions in the human retina. These lesions cause hindrance in vision and in severe cases, DR can lead to blindness. DR is observed amongst 80% of patients who have been diagnosed from prolonged diabetes for a period of 10-15 years. The manual process of periodic DR diagnosis and detection for necessary treatment, is time consuming and unreliable due to unavailability of resources and expert opinion. Therefore, computerized diagnostic systems which use Deep Learning (DL) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, are proposed to learn DR patterns from fundus images and identify the severity of the disease. This paper proposes a comprehensive model using 26 state-of-the-art DL networks to assess and evaluate their performance, and which contribute for deep feature extraction and image classification of DR fundus images. In the proposed model, ResNet50 has shown highest overfitting in comparison to Inception V3, which has shown lowest overfitting when trained using the Kaggle's EyePACS fundus image dataset. EfficientNetB4 is the most optimal, efficient and reliable DL algorithm in detection of DR, followed by InceptionResNetV2, NasNetLarge and DenseNet169. EfficientNetB4 has achieved a training accuracy of 99.37% and the highest validation accuracy of 79.11%. DenseNet201 has achieved the highest training accuracy of 99.58% and a validation accuracy of 76.80% which is less than the top-4 best performing models.