Automatic Classification of Preliminary Diabetic Retinopathy Stages using CNN

Diabetes Mellitus is one of the modern world's most prominent and dominant maladies. This condition later on leads to a menacing eye disease called Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). Diabetic Retinopathy is a retinal disease that is caused by high blood sugar levels in the retina, and can naturally progress to irreversible vision loss (blindness). The primary purpose of this imperative research is the early detection and classification of this hazardous condition, to try and prevent any threatening complications in the future. In the course of recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) turned out to be exceptionally famous and fruitful in solving and unraveling image processing and object detection problems for enormous datasets. Throughout this pivotal research, a model was proposed to detect the presence of (DR) and classify it into 5 distinct stages, factoring in an immense and substantial dataset. The model starts by applying preprocessing techniques such as normalization, to maintain the same dimensions for all the images before proceeding to the main processing stage. Furthermore, diverse sampling methods such as "Resize & Crop", "Rotation", and "Flipping" have been tested out, so as to pinpoint the best augmentation technique. Finally, the normalized images were fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to predict whether a person suffers from DR or not, and classify the level/stage of the disease. The proposed method was utilized on 88,700 retinal fundus images, which are a parcel of the full (EyePACS) dataset, and finally achieved 81.12%, 89.16%, and 84.16% for sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, respectively.