Detection of exudates in fundus photographs using convolutional neural networks

Diabetic retinopathy is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness in the developed world. Early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy enables timely treatment and in order to achieve it a major effort will have to be invested into screening programs and especially into automated screening programs. Detection of exudates is very important for early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. Deep neural networks have proven to be a very promising machine learning technique, and have shown excellent results in different compute vision problems. In this paper we show that convolutional neural networks can be effectively used in order to detect exudates in color fundus photographs.