Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease in diabetic patients due to damage to the small blood vessels in the retina due to high and low blood sugar levels. Accurate detection and classification of Diabetic Retinopathy is an important task in computer-aided diagnosis, especially when planning for diabetic retinopathy surgery. Therefore, this study aims to design an automated model based on deep learning, which helps ophthalmologists detect and classify diabetic retinopathy severity through fundus images. In this work, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with transfer learning and fine tunes has been proposed by using pre-trained networks known as Residual Network-50 (ResNet-50). The overall framework of the proposed classification model is divided into three major phases, including pre-processing, training the Resnet-50 network, and classification with evaluation. In the first phase, pre-processing techniques are applied to the APTOS2019 fundus images dataset to find the best features and highlight some fine details of these images. The resnet-50 network was trained in the second phase using the training set and saved the best model obtained that gives high accuracy during the training process. Finally, this saved model has been implemented on the testing dataset for classification DR grades. The proposed model shows good and best classification performance, which was obtained with an accuracy of 98.3%, a precision of 98.4%, an F1-Score of 98.5 % and the recall of 98.4%.
