Automatic Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy from Fundus Images Using Neuro-Evolutionary Algorithms.

Due to the presence of high glucose levels, diabetes mellitus (DM) is a widespread disease that can damage blood vessels in the retina and lead to loss of the visual system. To combat this disease, called Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), retinography, using images of the fundus of the retina, is the most used method for the diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy. The Deep Learning (DL) area achieved high performance for the classification of retinal images and even achieved almost the same human performance in diagnostic tasks. However, the performance of DL architectures is highly dependent on the optimal configuration of the hyperparameters. In this article, we propose the use of Neuroevolutionary Algorithms to optimize the hyperparameters corresponding to the DL model for the diagnosis of DR. The results obtained prove that the proposed method outperforms the results obtained by the classical approach.

Dataset from fundus images for the study of diabetic retinopathy.

This article presents a database containing 757 color fundus images acquired at the Department of Ophthalmology of the Hospital de Clínicas, Facultad de Ciencias Médicas (FCM), Universidad Nacional de Asunción (UNA), Paraguay. Firstly, the retinal images were acquired with a clinical procedure presented in this paper. The acquisition of the retinographies was made through the Visucam 500 camera of the Zeiss brand. Next, two expert ophthalmologists have classified the dataset. These data can help physicians and researchers in the detection of cases of Non-Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (NPDR) and Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (PDR), in their different stages. The dataset generated will be useful for ophthalmologists and researchers to work on automatic detection algorithms for Diabetic Retinopathy (DR).