Deep Feature Vectors Concatenation for Eye Disease Detection Using Fundus Image

Abstract

Fundus image is an image that captures the back of the eye (retina), which plays an important role in the detection of a disease, including diabetic retinopathy (DR). It is the most common complication in diabetics that remains an important cause of visual impairment, especially in the young and economically active age group. In patients with DR, early diagnosis can effectively help prevent the risk of vision loss. DR screening was performed by an ophthalmologist by analysing the lesions on the fundus image. However, the increasing prevalence of DR is not proportional to the availability of ophthalmologists who can read fundus images. It can lead to delayed prevention and management of DR. Therefore, there is a need for an automated diagnostic system as it can help ophthalmologists increase the efficiency of the diagnostic process. This paper provides a deep learning approach with the concatenate model for fundus image classification with three classes: no DR, non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR), and proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). The model architecture used is DenseNet121 and Inception-ResNetV2. The feature extraction results from the two models are combined and classified using the multilayer perceptron (MLP) method. The method that we propose gives an improvement compared to a single model with the results of accuracy, and average precision and recall of 91% and 90% for the F1-score, respectively. This experiment demonstrates that our proposed deep-learning approach is effective for the automatic DR classification using fundus photo data.