A novel diabetic retinopathy detection approach based on deep symmetric convolutional neural network

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) may lead to blindness in diabetic patients, which is one of the most severe eye diseases. Therefore, using automatical technology to detect DR at the early phase has very vital clinical significance. In order to detect the microaneurysms (MAs) and hard exudates (HEs) of DR, a novel detection method based on deep symmetric convolutional neural network is proposed in this paper. The symmetric convolutional structure is used to improve the effectiveness of feature extraction. The proposed method also can overcome the imbalance of positive and negative samples to avoid overfitting by increasing the width and depth of the network. Furthermore, different network structures (convolution, pooling) are used to achieve different feature filtering in the stage of feature extractions. According to the experimental results, the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art approach on the public dataset DIARETDB1 (DB1). The detection accuracy of the objects is 92.0%, 93.2%, 93.6%, when using different filtering structures (convolution, max-pooling, ave-pooling) respectively. The detection of microaneurysms is much improved by using ave-pooling layer for feature filtering, and the max-pooling layer can improve the detection of hard exudates.