Automatic Diagnostic of the Presence of Exudates in Retinal Images Using Deep Learning

Diabetes is one of the fastest-growing chronic diseases in the world. Diabetic retinopathy, a complication of Diabetes that affects vision, and if not treated promptly, can lead to total blindness of the patient. This abnormality has no cure, but if discovered in its early stages, there is a high chance that the patient will not reach total blindness. Detection of retinal background exudates is essential for the early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. In this paper, we present a deep learning model with a Convolutional Neural Network to diagnose exudates' presence or absence. The best results are about 99.52% sensitivity, 100% specificity, and about 99.76% accuracy for 1,608 images. Thus, the authors believe the proposed method can integrate a clinical system.