Statistical Texture Features Based Automatic Detection and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetes is a globally prevalent disease that can cause microvascular compilation such as Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) in the human eye organs and it might prompt a significant reason for visual deficiency. The present study aimed to develop an automatic detection and classification system to diagnosing diabetic retinopathy from digital fundus images. An automated diabetic retinopathy detection and classification system from retinal images is proposed in our work to reduce the workload of ophthalmologists. This work comprises three main stages. Our proposed method first extracts the blood vessels from color fundus image. Secondly, the method detects whatever the input image as normal or diabetic retinopathy and then illustrates an automatic diabetic retinopathy classification technique through statistical texture features. It embeds Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gray Level Run Length Matrix (GLRLM) for second-order and higher-order statistical texture feature as a feature extraction technique into three renowned classifiers namely K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The evaluation results containing a dataset of 644 retinal images indicate that the proposed method based on random forest classifier is found to be effective with a weighted sensitivity, precision, F1-score and accuracy of 95.53% 96.45%, 95.38% and 95.19% respectively for the detection and classification of diabetic retinopathy. These outcomes propose, that the method could decrease the cost of screening and diagnosis while achieving higher than suggested performance and that the system could be implemented in clinical assessments requiring better evaluating.