Diabetic Retinopathy Detection using Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract

Diabetic Retinopathy is a type of eye condition induced by diabetes, which damages the blood vessels in the retinal region and the area covered with lesions of varying magnitude determines the severity of the disease. It is one of the most leading causes of blindness amongst the employed community. A variety of factors are observed to play a role in a person to get this disease. Stress and prolonged diabetes are two of the most critical factors to top the list. This disease, if not predicted early, can lead to a permanent impairment of vision. If predicted in advance, the rate of impairment can be brought down or averted. However, it is not easy to detect the presence of this disease, given the time-consuming and tedious process of diagnosis. Presently, digital color photographs are evaluated manually by trained clinicians to observe the presence of lesions caused due to vascular abnormalities, which is the major effect of Diabetic Retinopathy. This method, although it is pretty accurate, proves to be costly. The delay brings out the need to automate the diagnosing, which will, in turn, have a significant positive impact on the health sector. In recent times, the adoption of AI in disease diagnosis has ensured promising and reliable results and this serves as the motivation for this journal. The paper employs Deep learning methodologies for automatic detection of Diabetic Retinopathy, resulting in a maximum accuracy of 80%, as compared to traditional Machine learning approaches giving only a maximum accuracy of 48% on the same IRDiR Disease Grading Dataset (413 images with 5 levels of DR-Training set; 103 images with 5 levels of DR-Test set). The data set contains digital fundus images of different levels of Diabetic Retinopathy in discrete frequency distributions.