Exudates Detection Based on SSD MobileNet for Referable Diabetic Retinopathy

Automatic detection of the referable Diabetic Retinopathy (RDR) has become essential in diabetic patients, especially who live in the remote regions, to avoid a serious visual impairment. For this reason, different approaches have been developed with the aim of detect and segment the principal DR lesions for automatic diagnosis of the RDR. Exudate is one of the DR lesions and if these lesions appear in the macular region, a diabetic macular edema (DME) can be suspected and a detailed analysis by ophthalmologist is required. Then it is important to detect these lesions with their position related to the macular region to determine the danger level. This paper presents an automatic method to localize the exudates and optic disc (OD) using Single Shot Detector (SSD) scheme based on MobileNet-V1 as base network to determine if the risk of DME exits to indicate patients the necessity of consultation by ophthalmologist. The proposed system is evaluated using MESSIDOR Database, providing 89.15% accuracy, 88.17% sensitivity and 91.67% specificity.