Diabetic retinopathy grading system based on transfer learning

Much effort is being made by the researchers in order to detect and diagnose diabetic retinopathy (DR) automatically and accurately. The disease is very dangerous as it can cause blindness suddenly if it is not continuously screened. Therefore, many computers aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed to diagnose the various DR grades. Recently, many CAD systems based on deep learning (DL) methods have been adopted to get deep learning merits in diagnosing the pathological abnormalities of DR disease. In this paper, we present a full based-DL CAD system, depending on multi-label classification. In the proposed DL CAD system, we present a customized EffecientNet model in order to diagnose the early and advanced grades of the DR disease based on transfer learning. Transfer learning is very useful in training small datasets. We utilized a multi-label Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD) dataset. The experiments manifest that the proposed DL CAD system is robust, reliable, and deigns promising results in detecting and grading DR. The proposed system achieved accuracy (ACC) equals 86%, and the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) equals 78.45%.