Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is a potentially blinding eye disorder
because of damage to the eye's retina which can affect babies born prematurely.
Screening of ROP is essential for early detection and treatment. This is a
laborious and manual process which requires trained physician performing
dilated ophthalmological examination which can be subjective resulting in lower
diagnosis success for clinically significant disease. Automated diagnostic
methods can assist ophthalmologists increase diagnosis accuracy using deep
learning. Several research groups have highlighted various approaches. Captured
ROP Retcam images suffer from poor quality. This paper proposes the use of
improved novel fundus preprocessing methods using pretrained transfer learning
frameworks to create hybrid models to give higher diagnosis accuracy. Once
trained and validated, the evaluations showed that these novel methods in
comparison to traditional imaging processing contribute to better and in many
aspects higher accuracy in classifying Plus disease, Stages of ROP and Zones in
comparison to peer papers.