Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies [ICICT 2021]

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21F70-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-8501-9

Transfer Learning Approach for Diabetic

Retinopathy Detection using Residual Network
T Jagathishkumar3
R.S.Rajkumar1
UG Scholar,
Assistant Professor, Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College
Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College
Coimbatore, India
Coimbatore, India
Dr. A. Grace Selvarani4
Divi Ragul2
Professor,
UG Scholar,
Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College
Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College
Coimbatore, India
2021 6th International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies (ICICT) | 978-1-7281-8501-9/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICICT50816.2021.9358468

Coimbatore, India

Abstract— Diabetic retinopathy is a disease caused due Level 1 – Mild DR

to Diabetes Mellitus in the diabetic patients. It is the major Level 2 – Moderate DR
cause of blindness for several countries. The longer the
diabetic retinopathy affected the high chance that the Level 3 – Proliferative DR
person can go blind. 90% of cases reported that the cause Level 4 – Severe DR
of blindness due to the diabetic retinopathy occur due to
the lack of proper treatment and monitoring the
retinopathy before severe stage [2]. The doctors can’t find
a cure to the severe stage of diabetic retinopathy but can
be detected in early stage and prevent it. Hence automated
computer diagnosis will assist the doctors in finding the
Diabetic Retinopathy at early stage with less cost and time.
Deep learning is playing a major role in health
informatics. Residual Network, a deep learning approach
is used to detect the DR and its stages. With the transfer
learning approach, Residual Network model detects the
stages of diabetic retinopathy with good accuracy.

Keywords— Diabetic Retinopathy Detection; Residual
Network; Transfer Learning; Deep Learning
I. INT RODUCT ION
Modern people are in the world of smart and technical. As
the days run faster in this technical world, all are interested in
inventing new things and all of them are forgetting about their
health... "Health" is the primary one for all human being.
Diabetic retinopathy is a damage to the retina caused by the
complications of diabetes mellitus. The retina is a membrane
that covers the back of the eye and it is sensitive to light. It
covers any light that hits the eye into the signals that can be
interpreted by the brain. This process produces visual images
and it is how sight functions in the human eye. Diabetic
retinopathy damages the blood vessels within the retinal
tissues, causing them to leak fluid and distort visions .Blurred
vision, impairment of colour vision, poor night vision are
some of the symptoms caused by the diabetic retinopathy. The
visual changes in DR eye is shown in figure 1. The Diabetic
retinopathy is classified into five stages
Level 0 – No DR
Figure 1: Visual Changes in the DR eye
Level 0 is the stage where there is no damage caused by
the diabetes mellitus. Level 1 and Level 2 is the stage where
there will be a few microaneurysms present in the retina.
Increase in the microaneurysms leads to the level 3 stage.
Level 4 is the stage which will lead to the blindness of the
patient.
II. LIT ERAT URE SURVEY
Various researchers have tried to create a model to detect the
diabetic retinopathy at earlier stage. Some of the models have
high accuracy but low sensitivity and some of them has low
accuracy but high sensitivity. The researchers have used
various techniques like supervised method. Kulwinder Mann
and Sukhpreet Kaur [3] used an Artificial Neural Network
model to detect the early stage of this disease. They mainly
concentrated on segmenting the blood vessels from the retina.
Karamai et al[4] uses the Dictionary learning based approach
method to detect the stages and it gives the accuracy of 90%.
Carrera et al [5] proposed a model which is based on the
Novel approach using digital processing, it gives the

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 Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies [ICICT 2021]
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21F70-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-8501-9

sensitivity of about 95%. Ellisa Riccietial[6]used the
Orthogonal lines SVM method to particularly increase the
accuracy of the model and it also succeeds it by getting an
accuracy of 96%. . Adarsh and Jeyakumari [7] proposed a
model that work on the classification issues (i.e: automatic
detection and classifying the DR model). It gave good results,
but it couldn’t satisfies the other type of classifiers. A new
algorithm was introduced by Hoover [8] which is used for
detecting the ageing of the blood capillaries with time and it
also segmenting them for the disease detection. Lee et.al [9]
gave a brief explanation of how to detect the walls of the
blood capillaries. Can et.al team [10] does extension work on
the tracking of the blood capillaries using the extension of the
blood vessels. Few methods and its performance were listed in
table 1.

Researchers Techniques used Sensitivity Specificity Accuracy

A hybrid approach i.e the combination of Fuzzy C-means

Rao et al [11] 100 95.83 96.67
clustering and Morphological processing

Carrera et al [5] Novel approach using digital processing 95 94 _

EllisaRiccietal [6] Orthogonal lines SVM _ _ 96

Roychowdhry et.al
Machine learning( Ada Boost Gaussian mixture model and KNN) 80 85 _
[12]

Karami et al [4] Dictionary learning(DL)-based approach _ _ 90

Table 1. Various Methods for Detecting DR and its performance

III. DAT ASET
The dataset consists of more than 35,000 images taken
from the kaggle dataset [ 1]. Each image has an input size of
512 x 512. Dataset consists of images from various patients
taken under different conditions. Each fundus image was
labeled from 0 to 4, indicating the stage of Diabetic
Retinopathy.
IV. TRANSFER LEARNING USING RESNET
The Transfer learning technique is applied to the for feature
extraction of DR. ResNet-50 is a CNN which is about 50
layers deep.ResNet-50 gives a good accuracy when compared
to other pretrained CNN.”Skip connection” is the backbone of
ResNet-50 , that is done to add the output from an earlier layer
to a later layer, this helps to overcome the Vanishing gradient
problem. Rectified Linear Unit(ReLU), an activation function
is added on the top of the pre-trained models which will
classify the extracted features.
A. Dataset pre-processing
1) Image Compression
The Dataset consists of more than 35,000 images(almost
35GB) taken from the ImageNet model. As the dataset
were huge in size, the dataset was significantly resized
before being passed into the network. The data was
downloaded on to a system, after downloading, the data
was cropped to reduce the black space as much as
possible. After resizing, the size of the each input image
is 512 x 512.
2) Image Thresholding
Image thresholding means a simple form of segmenting
images. Binary image from a grayscale or full-color
image can be created by using this method. This process
is done to separate “object” or foreground pixels and
background pixels. Separate threshold for each of the
RGB components of the image has been done and then
combined them with an AND operation. Automatic
thresholding is a great way to extract useful information
encoded into pixels while minimizing background
noise.
B. Transfer learning using Residual Network (ResNet)
Transfer Learning is a deep learning,( a subset of
machine learning ) technique where a model trained on
one task is re-purposed on a second related task. In
otherwords Transfer learning is an optimization, a
shortcut to reduce the running time for getting better
performance. Deep Learning (DL) takes the advantage
of the availability of training the large amount of data
and high computational power in solving problems such
as classification, feature extraction and regression.
Convolutional neural network (CNN), a Deep Learning
technique that are more suited to signals with multiple

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 Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies [ICICT 2021]
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21F70-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-8501-9

arrays such as images and videos. DL exactly depends The Performance measures used fix model evaluations are
on training the dataset for a long time to give the  Accuracy = (TP-TN)/(TP+TN+FP+FN)
expected output.The lack of training given to the dataset  Precision = TP/(TP+FP)
to train a model gives the wrong output (i.e. The amount  Sensitivity (Recall) = TP(TP+FN)
of time given to train a dataset plays an important role  F1Score = (2*Recall*Precision)/(Recall + Precision)
in giving the expected output, and also the lack of time Where ,
given to train a model is considered as a one of the key  True Positive (TP) = Predicted class is True and
challenges of applying DL in healthcare).Transfer actual class is also True.
learning reduces the data needed to be trained, and also  True Negative(TN) = Predicted class is False and
minimizes the training time to train the model. also actual class is also False.
 False Positive(FP) = Predicted class is True , but the
actual class is False.
False Negative(FN) = Predicted class False , but the actual
class is True.

Fig 2. Transfer learning block diagram [11] Figure 3: Results: Accuracy, Sensitivity and Specificity

The Transfer learning technique retrain only the last layers of

a pretrained neural network. The ResNet50 architecture
trained on the ImageNet dataset, which has been commonly
used for pre-training applications in computer vision. The
model is created and trained by using Fatsai. The pre-trained
model can be used as a separate feature extraction program, in
which case input can be pre-processed by the model or portion
of the model to a given the output for each input image, that
can then use as input when training a new model.

V. Experimental Setup
The classification of the classes were defined numerically as
0-No Diabetic Retinopathy , 1-Mild , 2-Moderate , 3-
Proliferative , 4-Severe.The model was implemented using
Python Programming language with tensor flow backend ,The
code was executed in Kaggle notebook using pycharm. The
input image given to the model is of size 512 x 512, with a
learning rate of 2e-3 Adam optimizer and multi class cross - Fig 4. Confusion matrix
entropy is used to avoid overfitting. All the parameters of the
model were initialized with pretrained ResNet-50 model VI Result Analysis
parameters already classification. The model was run on DGX A. Performance measures of ResNet on Kaggle dataset
server with tesla V100 GPU cards. The final trained network Table 2 gives the performance measures of ResNet
achieved 89.4% accuracy, 97% specificity and 57% sensitivity architecture on Kaggle Dataset
and the same is shown in figure 3. Recall
F1
35,162 images were taken from the kaggle dataset were split Class Accuracy Precision (Sensit Specificity
Score
into 80:20 ratio for training and testing. From this five classes ivity)
problem, we train the model to predict the class using the 0 83.95 99 83 40 90
transfer learning method with the help of ResNet-50. The 1 93.94 21 64 99 41
obtained confusion matrix is shown in figure 4. The model 2 88.12 37 67 96 48
defines accuracy as the amount of correct classification. 3 98 30 60 99 40
The final trained model achieved: 4 97.03 41 46 98 43
 Accuracy – 89.4% Table 2 performance measures of ResNet architecture
 Specificity – 97%
 Sensitivity – 57%

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 Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies [ICICT 2021]
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21F70-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-8501-9

Performance measurement of Kaggle Dataset

120

98 97.3 99 99 99 98
100 96
93.94
90
88.12
83.95 83

80
Class 0

67
64 Class 1
60
60
Class 2

48
46
43 Class 3
41 40 41 40
40 37
Class 4
30

21
20

0
Accuracy Precision Recall(Sensitivity) Specificity F1 Score

Fig 5: Performance Measures of Kaggle dataset

B. Comparison between Resnet 50 VS Other models Inception 97.8 98.05

Compared to other models ResNet-50, shows a great increase V3 98.65 98.29 99.85
in performance as shown in table 3 and figure 6. It is due to ResNet- 98.67 98.71
the residual layers which help to retain the low level features 18 99.06 98.76 99.89
of the fundus image. ResNet- 98.72 98.82
Network Accura Precisi Specifi Sensiti F1 50 99.15 98.94 99.90
cy on city vity Score (Propose
AlexNet 98.38 d model)
98.93 98.74 99.88 98.54 Table 3: Performance measures of various models
VGG-19 93.00 93.4
85.00 94.00 94.00

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 Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies [ICICT 2021]
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21F70-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-8501-9

ResNet-50 VS Other models

105

99.06 99.15 98.72 99.88 99.89 99.9 98.82

100 99.85
98.93 98.94 98.67
98.65 98.74 98.29 98.76 98.38 98.54 98.71
97.8 98.05
AlexNet

95 94
94
93 93.04
VGG-19

90
InceptionV
3

85
85 ResNet-18

ResNet-50
80

75
Accuracy Precision Sensitivity Specificity F1 Score

Fig 4: Performance measures of various models

VII Conclusion
Transfer learning approach using ResNet-50 model was
proposed. Diabetic retinopathy disease are incurable till now
as the scientist are trying to find the solution for this problem.
The patients can’t cure the problem, but they can prevent it
from going to severe stage by detecting it’s stage and taking
healthy foods. So, many authors proposing a model that can
detect the diabetic retinopathy stages in early period, but we
conclude that transfer learning model has a slight increase in
the development compared to the other models. From the
result analysis, it is observed that the model gives a a good
accuracy of 89.4%.In future with the help of this approach
some other author can increase it’s efficiency to peak and
make use of it for diabetic patients.
References
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[11] Harini R, Sheela N Rao, “Feature Extraction and Classification of
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