A tree structure-based classification of diabetic retinopathy stages using convolutional neural network

Detection, and classification of medical images have become a trending field of study during the last few decades. There is a considerable amount of vital challenges to be overcome. Ample work has been carried out to provide proper solutions for those key challenges. This study was carried out to extend one such medical image classification process to classify the stages of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) images from colour fundus images. The study proposes a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which is considered to be one of the most trending and efficient forms of classification of DR stages. Initially, the preprocessing techniques were employed to the DR fundus images with Green channel extraction and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). The data augmentation strategy was utilised to increase training images from the DR images. Finally, Feature extraction and classification were carried out by using the proposed CNN architecture. It consists of a 14 layered CNN model, which continues three main classifications. In this proposed classification, the images were classified into a tree structure based binary classification as No_DR and DR at the beginning, and then the DR images were again classified into two classes, namely Pre_Intermediate and Post_Intermediate. Moreover, those two classes were again separately classified into Mild, Moderate, and Proliferate_DR, Severe, respectively. The Kaggle is one of the benchmark dataset repositories which was used in this study. The proposed model was able to achieve accuracies of 81 %, 96%, 84%, and 97% for the above-mentioned classifications, respectively.