Modified Alexnet architecture for classification of diabetic retinopathy images

Abstract Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an illness occurring in the eye due to increase in blood glucose level. Among people in the age group of 70, 50% of deaths are attributed to diabetes. Early identification and appropriate treatment can reduce the loss of sight in many DR patients. Once the symptoms of DR are recognized, the severity of the disease should be evaluated for administering the right medication. This paper focuses on the classification of DR fundus images according to the severity of the disease using convolutional neural network with the application of suitable Pooling, Softmax and Rectified Linear Activation Unit (ReLU) layers to obtain a high level of accuracy. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been validated using Messidor database. In the case of healthy images, images of stage1, stage 2 and stage 3 of diabetic retinopathy, classification accuracies of 96.6% and 96.2%, 95.6% and 96.6% have been achieved.