Detecting Diabetic Retinopathy Using Embedded Computer Vision

Featured Application A low-cost solution for detecting diabetic retinopathy for the medically underserved population who do not have access to regular eye exams and are at increased risk of diabetes-related blindness. Diabetic retinopathy is one of the leading causes of vision loss in the United States and other countries around the world. People who have diabetic retinopathy may not have symptoms until the condition becomes severe, which may eventually lead to vision loss. Thus, the medically underserved populations are at an increased risk of diabetic retinopathy-related blindness. In this paper, we present development efforts on an embedded vision algorithm that can classify healthy versus diabetic retinopathic images. Convolution neural network and a k-fold cross-validation process were used. We used 88,000 labeled high-resolution retina images obtained from the publicly available Kaggle/EyePacs database. The trained algorithm was able to detect diabetic retinopathy with up to 76% accuracy. Although the accuracy needs to be further improved, the presented results represent a significant step forward in the direction of detecting diabetic retinopathy using embedded computer vision. This technology has the potential of being able to detect diabetic retinopathy without having to see an eye specialist in remote and medically underserved locations, which can have significant implications in reducing diabetes-related vision losses.