Effective methods of diabetic retinopathy detection based on deep convolutional neural networks

Purpose: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) has become the leading cause of blindness worldwide. In clinical practice, the detection of DR often takes a lot of time and effort for ophthalmologist. It is necessary to develop an automatic assistant diagnosis method based on medical image analysis techniques. Methods: Firstly, we design a feature enhanced attention module to capture focus lesions and regions. Secondly, we propose a stage sampling strategy to solve the problem of data imbalance on datasets and avoid the CNN ignoring the focus features of samples that account for small parts. Finally, we treat DR detection as a regression task to keep the gradual change characteristics of lesions and output the final classification results through the optimization method on the validation set. Results: Extensive experiments are conducted on open-source datasets. Our methods achieve 0.851 quadratic weighted kappa which outperforms first place in the Kaggle DR detection competition based on the EyePACS dataset and get the accuracy of 0.914 in the referable/non-referable task and 0.913 in the normal/abnormal task based on the Messidor dataset. Conclusion: In this paper, we propose three novel automatic DR detection methods based on deep convolutional neural networks. The results illustrate that our methods can obtain comparable performance compared with previous methods and generate visualization pictures with potential lesions for doctors and patients.