Ensemble framework of deep CNNs for diabetic retinopathy detection

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an eye disease that damages the blood vessels of the eye. DR causes blurred vision or it may lead to blindness if it is not detected in early stages. DR has five stages, i.e., 0 normal, 1 mild, 2 moderate, 3 severe, and 4 PDR. Conventionally, many hand-on projects of computer vision have been applied to detect DR but cannot code the intricate underlying features. Therefore, they result in poor classification of DR stages, particularly for early stages. In this research, two deep CNN models were proposed with an ensemble technique to detect all the stages of DR by using balanced and imbalanced datasets. The models were trained with Kaggle dataset on a high-end Graphical Processing data. Balanced dataset was used to train both models, and we test these models with balanced and imbalanced datasets. The result shows that the proposed models detect all the stages of DR unlike the current methods and perform better compared to state-of-the-art methods on the same Kaggle dataset.