Neural Networks with Manifold Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection

Widespread outreach programs using remote retinal imaging have proven to decrease the risk from diabetic retinopathy, the leading cause of blindness in the US. However, this process still requires manual verification of image quality and grading of images for level of disease by a trained human grader and will continue to be limited by the lack of such scarce resources. Computer-aided diagnosis of retinal images have recently gained increasing attention in the machine learning community. In this paper, we introduce a set of neural networks for diabetic retinopathy classification of fundus retinal images. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed classifiers in combination with preprocessing and augmentation steps on a sample dataset. Our experimental results show that neural networks in combination with preprocessing on the images can boost the classification accuracy on this dataset. Moreover the proposed models are scalable and can be used in large scale datasets for diabetic retinopathy detection. The models introduced in this paper can be used to facilitate the diagnosis and speed up the detection process.