Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) Severity Level Classification Using Multimodel Convolutional Neural Networks.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a progressive eye disease that affects a large portion of working-age adults. DR, which may progress to an irreversible state that causes blindness, can be diagnosed with a comprehensive dilated eye exam. With the eye dilated, the Doctor takes pictures of the inside of the eye via a medical procedure called Fluorescein Angiography, in which a dye is injected into the bloodstream. The dye highlights the blood vessels in the back of the eye so they can be photographed. In addition, the Doctor may request an Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) exam, by which cross-sectional photos of the retina are produced to measure the thickness of the retina. Early prognostication is vital in treating the disease and preventing it from progressing into advanced irreversible stages. Skilled medical personnel and necessary medical facilities are required to detect DR in its five major stages. In this paper, we propose a diagnostic tool to detect Diabetic retinopathy from fundus images by using an ensemble of multi-inception CNN networks. Our inception block consists of three Convolutional layers with kernel sizes of 3x3, 5x5, and 1x1 that are concatenated deeply and forwarded to the max-pooling layer. We experimentally compare our proposed method with two pre-trained models: VGG16 and GoogleNets. The experiment results show that the proposed method can achieve an accuracy of 93.2% by an ensemble of 10 random networks, compared to 81% obtained with transfer learning based on VGG19.