Deep Learning Frameworks for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection with Smartphone-based Retinal Imaging Systems

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) may result in various degrees of vision loss and even blindness if not diagnosed in a timely manner. Therefore, having an annual eye exam helps early detection to prevent vision loss in earlier stages, especially for diabetic patients. Recent technological advances made smartphone-based retinal imaging systems available on the market to perform small-sized, low-powered, and affordable DR screening in diverse environments. However, the accuracy of DR detection depends on the field of view and image quality. Since smartphone-based retinal imaging systems have much more compact designs than a traditional fundus camera, captured images are likely to be the low quality with a smaller field of view. Our motivation in this paper is to develop an automatic DR detection model for smartphone-based retinal images using the deep learning approach with the ResNet50 network. This study first utilized the well-known AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet50 architectures, using the transfer learning approach. Second, these frameworks were retrained with retina images from several datasets including EyePACS, Messidor, IDRiD, and Messidor-2 to investigate the effect of using images from the single, cross, and multiple datasets. Third, the proposed ResNet50 model is applied to smartphone-based synthetic images to explore the DR detection accuracy of smartphone-based retinal imaging systems. Based on the vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy detection results, the proposed approach achieved a high classification accuracy of 98.6%, with a 98.2% sensitivity and a 99.1% specificity while its AUC was 0.9978 on the independent test dataset. As the main contributions, DR detection accuracy was improved using the deep transfer learning approach for the ResNet50 network with publicly available datasets and the effect of the field of view in smartphone-based retinal imaging was studied. Although a smaller number of images were used in the training set compared with the existing studies, considerably acceptable high accuracies for validation and testing data were obtained.