Detection and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy Using AlexNet Architecture of Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

There are countless number of people with diabetes around the world. diabetic retinopathy (DR), a major complication of diabetes, is a retinal disease that results in blindness if not treated in the earlier stages. Early detection of diabetic retinopathy in patients can help avoid further loss of eyesight. For early detection, it is important for diabetic patients to undergo medical tests after a frequent amount of times. Diagnosing DR using fundus images is a difficult and time-consuming task which requires professional expertise to find and identify if the DR traits are present in the eye. In our proposed system, we make use of artificial intelligence, convolutional neural networks precisely to make the process of detection and classification of diabetic retinopathy a lot simpler and fast. The proposed model makes use of AlexNet which is a convolutional neural network architecture which is trained based on fundus image database to accurately diagnose DR with minimum efforts. The database contains multiple cases of retinal hemorrhage, microaneurism, cotton wool spots, etc. The retinal image of the patient is fed to the system where initially the image is trimmed to match the input layer of AlexNet and then the neural network extracts features and the model gets trained in order to further classify the diabetic retinopathy patients. The last layer of the convolutional neural network is developed in such a way each segment of image is assigned a specific weight factor where higher the weight, more is the chances of getting severe DR.