This paper proposes the importance of age and gender information in the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. We utilized Deep Residual Neural Networks (ResNet) and Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet), which are proven effective on image
classification problems and the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy using the retinal fundus images. We used the ensemble of several classical networks and decentralized the training so that the network was simple and avoided overfitting. To observe whether the age and gender information could help enhance the performance, we added the information before the dense layer and compared the results with the results that did not add age and gender information. We found that the test accuracy of the network with age and gender information was 2.67% higher than that of the network without age and gender information. Meanwhile, compared with gender information, age information had a better help for the results.
