Fine-tuning of pre-trained convolutional neural networks for diabetic retinopathy screening: a clinical study

Diabetic retinopathy is a serious complication of diabetes, and if not controlled, may cause blindness. Automated screening of diabetic retinopathy helps physicians to diagnose and control the disease in early stages. In this paper, two case studies are proposed, each on a different dataset. Firstly, automatic screening of diabetic retinopathy utilising pre-trained convolutional neural networks was employed on the Kaggle dataset. The reason for using pre-trained networks is to save time and resources during training compared to fully training a convolutional neural network. The proposed networks were fine-tuned for the pre-processed dataset, and the selectable parameters of the fine-tuning approach were optimised. At the end, the performance of the fine-tuned network was evaluated using a clinical dataset comprising 101 images. The clinical dataset is completely independent from the fine-tuning dataset and is taken by a different device with different image quality and size.