Deep Learning based Method for Multi-class Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetes mellitus is a form of diabetes with secondary microvascular complication leading to renal dysfunction and retinal loss also termed as diabetic retinopathy. Retinopathy is grave form of retinal disease. It is the leading cause of blindness in the world. Blockage of tiny minute retinal blood vessels due to the high blood sugar level is the reason why retinopathy leads to blindness or loss of vision. This study serves the purpose of deep learning-based diagnosis of Diabetic retinopathy using the fundus imaging of the eye. In this study architectures such as VGG 16 and VGG 19 are deployed in order to classify the images into 5 categories. The performance of the two models were compared. The highest accuracy is 77.67% when using the VGG 16 pre-trained model