Automatic recognition of severity level for diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy using deep visual features

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is leading cause of blindness among diabetic patients. Recognition of severity level is required by ophthalmologists to early detect and diagnose the DR. However, it is a challenging task for both medical experts and computer-aided diagnosis systems due to requiring extensive domain expert knowledge. In this article, a novel automatic recognition system for the five severity level of diabetic retinopathy (SLDR) is developed without performing any pre- and post-processing steps on retinal fundus images through learning of deep visual features (DVFs). These DVF features are extracted from each image by using color dense in scale-invariant and gradient location-orientation histogram techniques. To learn these DVF features, a semi-supervised multilayer deep-learning algorithm is utilized along with a new compressed layer and fine-tuning steps. This SLDR system was evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art techniques using the measures of sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP) and area under the receiving operating curves (AUC). On 750 fundus images (150 per category), the SE of 92.18%, SP of 94.50% and AUC of 0.924 values were obtained on average. These results demonstrate that the SLDR system is appropriate for early detection of DR and provide an effective treatment for prediction type of diabetes.