Hybrid machine learning architecture for automated detection and grading of retinal images for diabetic retinopathy

Author(s)

Barath Narayanan, University of Dayton
Barath Narayanan, University of Dayton
Russell C. Hardie, University of DaytonFollow
Manawaduge Supun De Silva, University of Dayton
Nathaniel K. Kueterman, University of Dayton

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2020

Publication Source

Journal of Medical Imaging

Abstract

Purpose: Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness, affecting over 93 million people. An automated clinical retinal screening process would be highly beneficial and provide a valuable second opinion for doctors worldwide. A computer-aided system to detect and grade the retinal images would enhance the workflow of endocrinologists. Approach: For this research, we make use of a publicly available dataset comprised of 3662 images. We present a hybrid machine learning architecture to detect and grade the level of diabetic retinopathy (DR) severity. We also present and compare simple transfer learning-based approaches using established networks such as AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet, Inception-v3, NASNet, DenseNet, and GoogLeNet for DR detection. For the grading stage (mild, moderate, proliferative, or severe), we present an approach of combining various convolutional neural networks with principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction and a support vector machine classifier. We study the performance of these networks under different preprocessing conditions. Results: We compare these results with various existing state-of-the-art approaches, which include single-stage architectures.We demonstrate that this architecture is more robust to limited training data and class imbalance. We achieve an accuracy of 98.4% for DR detection and an accuracy of 96.3% for distinguishing severity of DR, thereby setting a benchmark for future research efforts using a limited set of training images. Conclusions: Results obtained using the proposed approach serve as a benchmark for future research efforts. We demonstrate as a proof-of-concept that an automated detection and grading system could be developed with a limited set of images and labels. This type of independent architecture for detection and grading could be used in areas with a scarcity of trained clinicians based on the necessity.

ISBN/ISSN

2329-4302

Document Version

Published Version

Comments

The document is made available in compliance with the publisher's policy on self-archiving. Permission documentation is on file. To view the paper on the journal website, use the DOI: https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.7.3.034501

Publisher

Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers

Volume

7

Peer Reviewed

yes

Issue

3

Keywords

computer-aided detection, convolutional neural networks, diabetic retinopathy, endocrinology, principal component analysis, support vector machine, University of Dayton Electro-optics and Photonics

eCommons Citation

Narayanan, Barath; Narayanan, Barath; Hardie, Russell C.; De Silva, Manawaduge Supun; and Kueterman, Nathaniel K., "Hybrid machine learning architecture for automated detection and grading of retinal images for diabetic retinopathy" (2020). Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications. 425.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/ece_fac_pub/425