Optimal Convolutional Networks for Staging and Detecting of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the main ocular complication of diabetes. Asymptomatic for a long time, it is subject to annual screening using dilated fundus or retinal photography to look for early signs. Fundus photography and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are used by ophthalmologists to assess retinal thickness and structure, as well as detect edema, hemorrhage, and scarring. The effectiveness of ConvNet no longer needs to be demonstrated, and its use in the field of imaging has made it possible to overcome many barriers, which were until now insurmountable with old methods. Throughout this study, a robust and optimal deep ConvNet is proposed to analyze fundus images and automatically distinguish between healthy, moderate, and severe DR. The proposed model combines the use of the ConvNet architecture taken from ImageNet, data augmentation, class balancing, and transfer learning in order to establish a benchmarking test. A significant improvement at the level of middle class which corresponds to the early stage of DR, which was the major problem in previous studies. By eliminating the need for retina specialists and broadening access to retinal care, the proposed model is substantially more robust in objectively early staging and detecting DR.