A deep neural network and machine learning approach for retinal fundus image classification

Abstract

Diabetes is a common chronic disease and a major public health problem approaching epidemic proportions globally. People with diabetes are more likely to suffer from glaucoma than people without diabetes. Glaucoma can lead to loss of vision if not diagnosed at an early stage. This study proposes an intelligent computer-aided triage system with a deep neural network and machine learning to develop and analyze color retinal fundus images and classify glaucomatous retinal images. Deep features of retinal images from the fundus retinal image are extracted using a deep neural network, and the classification of features is performed and analyzed using different machine learning classifiers. Experimental results show that the combination of deep neural network and logistic regression-based classifier outperforms all existing glaucomatous triage systems, improving classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.