Feed-Forward Back Propagation Network for the prediction of diabetic retinopathy disorder

Abstract

Some retina disorders mainly involve some blocked blood clots so that, the retinal vessels change their structure, being unable to completely nourish the retina. For an accurate investigation of retina disorders, the extraction of the retinal vessel anatomical structures or lesions is the main task. This paper reports a combination of various features extracted from retinal images, that are further used to train a Feed-Forward Back Propagation Network (FFBPN) as a decision system. The main goal is determining the combination of the appropriate features for more accurate classification of healthy and diseased patients. To achieve this goal, 120 binary images covering both categories of patients that belong to the STARE (Structured Analysis of the Retina) database were analyzed. The input data are the number of ridges, bifurcation, and bridges for retinal vessel pattern recognition. The FFBPNs with 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 neurons in the hidden layer are trained. The FFBNP architecture with 12 neurons in the hidden layer, using the tansig transfer function in the hidden layer and linear transfer function in the output layer provides the most appropriate model for retinopathy disease classification. The correlation between the number of ridges and bridges computed for healthy patients (as actual values) and the number of ridges and bridges for diabetic patients (as predicted values) provides the best result, a regression coefficient (R) of 0. 8575 and a mean-square error (MSE) of 0.00163.