A Transfer Learning Approach for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Diabetic Retinopathy is a disease in which the retina is damaged due to diabetes mellitus. It is a leading cause for blindness today. Detection and quantification of such mellitus from retinal images is tedious and requires expertise. In this paper, an automatic identification of severity of Diabetic Retinopathy using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with a transfer learning approach has been proposed to aid the diagnostic process. A comparison of different CNN architectures such as ResNet, Inception-ResNet-v2 etc. is done using the quadratic weighted kappa metric. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach is carried out on the Diabetic Retinopathy detection dataset from Kaggle. From the results, we observe that the proposed model achieves a kappa score of 0.76.