A refined ResNet18 architecture with Swish activation function for Diabetic Retinopathy classification

Automatic detection of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is critically important, as it is the primary reason of irreversible loss of vision in the economically active populations in the developed countries. Early detection of the onset of Diabetic Retinopathy can greatly benefit clinical treatment; although several different feature extraction methods have been proposed, the task of retinal image classification remains tedious even for trained clinicians. This paper emphasizes on Diabetic Retinopathy detection as well as the analysis of the different stages of DR, performed on fundus images using Deep Learning algorithms. Fundus images of the patient were provided as input to the developed model evaluated using the real-time dataset of the hospital. The proposed ResNet-18 architecture with swish function has achieved an accuracy of 93.51%, sensitivity of 93.42%, precision of 93.77% and F1-score of 93.59%. The paper concludes with a comparative study of Simple CNN, VGGNet-16, MobileNet-V2 and ResNet architectures and other state-of-art approaches, which highlights ResNet-18 with Swish as the most effective deep learning classifier model for DR detection.