Deep Learning based detection of Diabetic Retinopathy from Inexpensive fundus imaging techniques

Diabetic Retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness across the world as per statistics published by the World Health Organization. Recently, there has been significant research on adopting deep learning methodologies to automate and improve the process of evaluating the advent and progress of chronic eye diseases using eye fundus images. Typically, eye fundus imaging equipment is used by trained specialists for evaluating eye health, however, fundus imaging tends to be expensive, and also the high-end equipment used is typically available in large hospitals and urban areas. This cost barrier leads to an imbalance in care between the developed and developing parts of the world. In this paper, we propose an inexpensive stand-in for such a device and a deep neural model pipeline that is able to analyze these images to determine the need for further evaluation from a trained ophthalmologist. The pipeline is able to achieve an AUC score of 0.9781 in detecting Referable DR. We also benchmark the proposed deep learning pipeline against other pipelines on standard datasets to demonstrate the capability of the network.