Classification of Fundus Images Based on Deep Learning for Detecting Eye Diseases
Nakhim Chea, Yunyoung Nam
Abstract
Various techniques to diagnose eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy (DR), glaucoma (GLC), and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), are possible through deep learning algorithms. A few recent studies have examined a couple of major diseases and compared them with data from healthy subjects. However, multiple major eye diseases, such as DR, GLC, and AMD, could not be detected simultaneously by computer-aided systems to date. There were just high-performance-outcome researches on a pair of healthy and eye-diseased group, besides of four categories of fundus image classification. To have a better knowledge of multi-categorical classification of fundus photographs, we used optimal residual deep neural networks and effective image preprocessing techniques, such as shrinking the region of interest, iso-luminance plane contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization, and data augmentation. Applying these to the classification of three eye diseases from currently available public datasets, we achieved peak and average accuracies of 91.16% and 85.79%, respectively. The specificities for images from the eyes of healthy, GLC, AMD, and DR patients were 90.06%, 99.63%, 99.82%, and 91.90%, respectively. The better specificity performances may alert patient in an early stage of eye diseases to prevent vision loss. This study presents a possible occurrence of a multi-categorical deep neural network technique that can be deemed as a successful pilot study of classification for the three most-common eye diseases and can be used for future assistive devices in computer-aided clinical applications.