Classification of diabetic macular edema severity using deep learning technique

Purpose Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a kind of hard exudates lesion seen near the diabetic macular region of the retina. DME causes visual loss and may result in complete blindness; early identification and treatment may be able to cure this. Identification of DME at an early stage is a challenging and error-prone task. To address this issue, the article presents a methodology that uses the notion of transfer learning to identify cases of DME from retinal fundus images. Methods A pre-trained DenseNet121 is used in this technique to extract the useful set of feature vectors from the fundus images, which are then fed into a few additional fully connected layers and then into the classification layer to classify DME instances. A total of 577 fundus training images from 3 DME classes were used to train the proposed model, and 103 fundus testing images were used to verify the proposed model for classifying them into one of the three DME cases. Results The suggested model is trained and tested on the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD). With the test images, the results demonstrate that the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art models presented in “Diabetic Retinopathy – Segmentation and Grading Challenge” held at ISBI-2018 with an accuracy of 86.4%. Conclusion The proposed model diagnoses DME at an early stage for timely treatment and helps to reduce the workload of ophthalmologists.