A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Recognition of Diabetic Retinopathy in Fundus Images

Background: Diabetic retinopathy is one of the complexities of diabetics and a major cause of vision loss worldwide which come into sight due to prolonged diabetes. For the automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy through fundus images several technical approaches have been proposed. The visual information processing by convolutional neural network makes itself more suitable due to its spatial arrangement of units. Convolutional neural networks are at their peak of development and best results can be gained by proper use of the technique. The local connectivity, parameter sharing and pooling of hidden units are advantageous for various predictions. Objective: Objective of this paper is to design a model for classification of diabetic retinopathy. Methods: A fully convolutional neural network model is developed to classify the diseased and healthy fundus images. Here, proposed neural network consists of six convolutional layers along with rectified linear unit activations and max pooling layers. The absence of fully connected layer reduces the computational complexity of the model and trains faster as compared to traditional convolutional neural network models. Results and Conclusion: The validation of the proposed model is accomplished by training it with a publicly available high-resolution fundus image database. The model is also compared with various existing state-of-the-art methods which show competitive result as compared to these models. A behavioural study of different parameters of the network model is represented. The intelligence of our model lies in its ability to re-tune weight to overcome outliers encountered in future. The proposed model works well with satisfactory performance.