The classification of eye diseases from fundus images based on CNN and pretrained models

Abstract

Visual impairment affects more than a billion people worldwide due to insufficient care or inadequate vision screening. Computer-aided diagnosis using deep neural networks is a promising approach, it can analyse and process retinal fundus images, providing valuable reference data for doctors in clinical diagnosis or screening. This study aims to achieve an accurate classification of fundus images, including images of healthy patients as well as those with diabetic retinopathy, cataracts, and glaucoma, using a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and several pretrained models (AlexNet, GoogleNet, ResNet18, ResNet50, YOLOv3, and VGG 19). To enhance the training process, a mirror effect technique was applied to augment the volume of data. The experimental study resulted in very satisfactory outcomes, with the GoogleNet model paired with the SGDM optimiser achieving the highest accuracy (92.7 %).