Automatic Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Fundus Images and Machine Learning Algorithms

Diabetic Retinopathy is a vision impairment caused by blood vessel degeneration in the retina. It is becoming more widespread as it is linked to diabetes. Diabetic retinopathy can lead to blindness. Early detection of diabetic retinopathy by an ophthalmologist can help avoid vision loss and other complications. Diabetic retinopathy is currently diagnosed by visually recognizing irregularities on fundus pictures. This procedure, however, necessitates the use of ophthalmic imaging technologies to acquire fundus images as well as a detailed visual analysis of the stored photos, resulting in a costly and time-consuming diagnosis. The fundamental goal of this project is to create an easy-to-use machine learning model tool that can accurately predict diabetic retinopathy using pre-recorded digital fundus images. To create the suggested classifier model, we gathered annotated fundus images from publicly accessible data repositories and used two machine learning methods, support vector machine (SVM) and deep neural network (DNN). On test data, the proposed SVM model had a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 97.11%, whereas the DNN model had a mean AUC of 99.15%.