Ocular Cataract Identification Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Ocular cataract is among diseases that result in blindness if not treated in time. It affects people worldwide, primarily in underdeveloped countries. This health problem affects the quality of patients' lives. However, early diagnosis avoids blindness and allows the patient to have appropriate treatment. Developing countries, especially those with low income, have a precarious health system, even in the ophthalmology sector, where equipment is lacking. This research aims to develop a deep learning-based model to detect ocular cataracts based on retinal images. We collect 1000 retinal images from Kaggle, which are then equally divided into two classes: with and without cataracts. We then use several neural architectures to correctly classify these images, including ResNet18, ResNet34, InceptionResNetV2, and InceptionV4. We demonstrate that ResNet18 outperforms the other architectures, reaching 95.5% accuracy score. Our results suggest that deep convolutional neural networks can achieve a significant performance in ocular cataracts classification using retinal images.