Stroke is a major reason for disability and mortality in most of the developing nations. Early detection of stroke is highly significant in bio-medical research. Research illustrates that signs of stroke are reflected in the eye and may be analyzed from fundus images. A custom dataset of fundus images has been compiled for formulating an automated stroke detection algorithm. In this paper, a comparative study of hand-crafted texture features and convolutional neural network (CNN) has been recommended for stroke diagnosis. The custom CNN model has also been compared with five pre-trained models from ImageNet. Experimental results reveal that the recommended custom CNN model gives the best performance by achieving an accuracy of 95.8 %.