Triple-DRNet: A triple-cascade convolution neural network for diabetic retinopathy grading using fundus images

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a universal ocular complication of diabetes patients and also the main disease that causes blindness in the world wide. Automatic and efficient DR grading acts a vital role in timely treatment. However, it is difficult to effectively distinguish different types of distinct lesions (such as neovascularization in proliferative DR, microaneurysms in mild NPDR, etc.) using traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN), which greatly affects the ultimate classification results. In this article, we propose a triple-cascade network model (Triple-DRNet) to solve the aforementioned issue. The Triple-DRNet effectively subdivides the classification of five types of DR as well as improves the grading performance which mainly includes the following aspects: (1) In the first stage, the network carries out two types of classification, namely DR and No DR. (2) In the second stage, the cascade network is intended to distinguish the two categories between PDR and NPDR. (3) The final cascade network will be designed to differentiate the mild, moderate and severe types in NPDR. Experimental results show that the ACC of the Triple-DRNet on the APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection dataset achieves 92.08%, and the QWK metric reaches 93.62%, which proves the effectiveness of the devised Triple-DRNet compared with other mainstream models.