This document discusses using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to automatically detect diabetic retinopathy from fundus images. It aims to classify images into multiple severity levels, including early stages of the disease. The authors train and test CNN models on two datasets containing over 35,000 retinal images total. While CNNs achieve high accuracy for binary classification, performance decreases with additional severity classes, particularly for mild or early-stage disease. The authors explore techniques like data augmentation and transfer learning to improve CNN performance on multi-class classification of diabetic retinopathy severity levels from fundus images.