Identification of different stages of diabetic retinopathy using retinal optical images

Diabetes is a disease which occurs when the pancreas does not secrete enough insulin or the body is unable to process it properly. This disease affects slowly the circulatory system including that of the retina. As diabetes progresses, the vision of a patient may start to deteriorate and lead to diabetic retinopathy. In this study on different stages of diabetic retinopathy, 124 retinal photographs were analyzed. As a result, four groups were identified, viz., normal retina, moderate non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy, severe non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy and proliferative diabetic retinopathy. Classification of the four eye diseases was achieved using a three-layer feedforward neural network. The features are extracted from the raw images using the image processing techniques and fed to the classifier for classification. We demonstrate a sensitivity of more than 90% for the classifier with the specificity of 100%.