Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the major complications of Diabetes, which is the injury to the retina of the diabetic patient and causes blindness if not diagnosed in early stages. Various machine learning classification and clustering approaches have been studied in literature with the purpose of improving the accuracy of the screening methods. Some of machine learning classification and clustering approaches are based on manually feature extraction of fundus images by image processing experts. In recent years, a new approach for image classification and diagnosis without using any manual feature extraction is proposed based on convolutional neural network (CNN). In medical imaging and diagnosis, training a deep CNN from scratch is difficult because it requires a large amount of labeled training data and the training procedure is a time consuming task to ensure proper convergence. Therefore, a very common method to train CNNs for medical diagnosis is fine-tuning a pre-trained CNN. In this paper, the pre-trained GoogleNet as a powerful CNN is employed on the Kaggle database for DR diagnosis from retinal images. To assess the efficacy of the clinical results, the proposed CNN algorithm is performed to diagnose DR from the images that are gathered from the the Navid-Didegan ophthalmology clinic.