Diabetic retinopathy classification based on multipath CNN and machine learning classifiers

Eye care professionals generally use fundoscopy to confirm the occurrence of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) in patients. Early DR detection and accurate DR grading are critical for the care and management of this disease. This work proposes an automated DR grading method in which features can be extracted from the fundus images and categorized based on severity using deep learning and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. A Multipath Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) is used for global and local feature extraction from images. Then, a machine learning classifier is used to categorize the input according to the severity. The proposed model is evaluated across different publicly available databases (IDRiD, Kaggle (for DR detection), and MESSIDOR) and different ML classifiers (Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and J48). The metrics selected for model evaluation are the False Positive Rate (FPR), Specificity, Precision, Recall, F1-score, K-score, and Accuracy. The experiments show that the best response is produced by the M-CNN network with the J48 classifier. The classifiers are evaluated across the pre-trained network features and existing DR grading methods. The average accuracy obtained for the proposed work is 99.62% for DR grading. The experiments and evaluation results show that the proposed method works well for accurate DR grading and early disease detection.