CLAHE-AlexNet optimized deep learning model for accurate detection of diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a disease that affects the blood vessels that are located in the retina. Loss of vision due to diabetes is a common consequence of the illness and a key factor in the progression of vision loss and blindness. Both ophthalmology and diabetes research have become more dependent on computer vision and image processing techniques in recent years. Fundus photography, also known as a fundus image, is a method that may be used to capture an image of the back of a person's eye. This article presents optimized deep learning model for diagnostic marking in retinal fundus images towards accurate detection of retinopathy. For experimental work, 500 images were selected from available open source Kaggle data set. 400 images were used to train deep learning model and remaining 100 images were used to validate the model. Images were enhanced using the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) algorithm. Pre trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models-AlexNet, VGG16, GoogleNet, and ResNet are used for classification and prediction of images. Accuracy, specificity, precision and F1-score of AlexNet is better than VGG16, ResNet-50, and GoogleNet. Sensitivity of ResNet-50 is higher than other pre trained CNN models.