Comparative study on early recognition and identifying diabetic retinopathy with different layers in CNN

Diabetes is the most prevalent condition worldwide, and diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a subsequent condition caused by acute diabetic cases. It causes severe degeneration of the retina. The compounding blood vessels bloat and often burst, causing fluid leaks in the aqueous humor. This, in turn, causes the creation of undesirable nerve fiber infractions from the occlusion of arteries. Diagnosis requires a manual retinal examination that can often be inconsistent and deliberate with potential flaws in the diagnosis. Early detection through an ophthalmologist is paramount to prevent the prognosis of severe vision loss. Considering the current leap of machine learning in the field of healthcare, early detection of DR can be potentially made efficient with intelligent systems. This research proposes methodologies to fine-tune the existing pre-trained architectures, attaining the classification accuracies of 98% to classify the ocular fundus images which identify early prediction of diabetes. Additionally, this study presents an exposition of other equally scrutinized approaches to ultimately showcase a deep neural network architecture that can precisely classify normal fundus and degenerated fundus from the lowest to the most severe hierarchy. Among several layers in the CNN model pre-tuning and post-tuning exception layers outperformed with good results.