The biomedical community has shown a continued interest in automated detection of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), with new imaging techniques, evolving diagnostic criteria, and advancing computing methods. Existing state of the art for detecting DR-related lesions tends to emphasize different, specific approaches for each type of lesion. However, recent research has aimed at general frameworks adaptable for large classes of lesions. In this paper, we follow this latter trend by exploring a very flexible framework, based upon two-tiered feature extraction (low-level and mid-level) from images and Support Vector Machines. The main contribution of this work is the evaluation of BossaNova, a recent and powerful midlevel image characterization technique, which we contrast with previous art based upon classical Bag of Visual Words (BoVW). The new technique using BossaNova achieves a detection performance (measured by area under the curve — AUC) of 96.4% for hard exudates, and 93.5% for red lesions using a cross-dataset training/testing protocol