Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks with Background Removal, and Data Augmentation

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a potentially blinding complication affecting individuals with diabetes, where early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to preventing vision loss. Recent advances in deep learning have shown promise in automating DR diagnosis, offering faster, more reliable, and cost-effective solutions. Our study employed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify the severity of DR using retinal images from the EyePACS dataset, which includes 35,155 images categorized into five classes. Building on previous research that often classified DR into two classes, such as no DR and varying levels of DR, we found that while these studies typically used models like Inception V3, VGGNet, and ResNet, they focused on simplifying the diagnostic process by reducing the number of classes. However, our approach utilized a smaller, more flexible CNN architecture, allowing for a more detailed classification into five stages of DR. We employed various image preprocessing techniques, including grayscale conversion, background removal, and data augmentation, with our findings indicating that background removal significantly enhanced model performance, achieving a validation accuracy of 90.60%. This underscores the importance of sophisticated data preprocessing in medical imaging, and our study contributes to the ongoing development of automated DR diagnosis, potentially easing the burden on healthcare systems and improving patient outcomes.