Referable diabetic retinopathy identification from eye fundus images with weighted path for convolutional neural network

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common cause of blindness in middle-age subjects and low DR screening rates demonstrates the need for an automated image assessment system, which can benefit from the development of deep learning techniques. Therefore, the effective classification performance is significant in favor of the referable DR identification task. In this paper, we propose a new strategy, which applies multiple weighted paths into convolutional neural network, called the WP-CNN, motivated by the ensemble learning. In WP-CNN, multiple path weight coefficients are optimized by back propagation, and the output features are averaged for redundancy reduction and fast convergence. The experiment results show that with the efficient training convergence rate WP-CNN achieves an accuracy of 94.23% with sensitivity of 90.94%, specificity of 95.74%, an area under the receiver operating curve of 0.9823 and F1-score of 0.9087. By taking full advantage of the multipath mechanism, the proposed WP-CNN is shown to be accurate and effective for referable DR identification compared to the state-of-art algorithms.