Automated microaneurysms detection in retinal images using SSA optimised U-NET and Bayesian optimised CNN

Abstract

ABSTRACT Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a cause of vision loss and blindness, and early detection of red lesions, particularly microaneurysms (MAs), is crucial to prevent its progression. In this study, we propose an effective deep learning-based DR segmentation and classification method that leverages hyper-parameter optimisation to achieve high detection accuracy. In our proposed method, we first pre-processed retinal images to reduce background variability. Then, we employed a squirrel search optimised bidirectional ConvLSTM U-net with an attention gate for DR segmentation in the main processing step. Finally, we used a Bayesian-optimised Convolutional Neural Network for classification. We selected the optimal architectures for our proposed CNNs and optimised their hyper-parameters using the Bayesian optimisation technique.Our study demonstrates that the proposed CNNs effectively classify diabetic retinopathy in fundus images when model hyper-parameters are tuned with the help of Bayesian optimisation. We conducted statistical tests based on the receiver operating characteristic curve, histogram, and ANOVA test to verify the effectiveness of our suggested models.We proposed a deep learning-based DR segmentation and classification method that leverages hyper-parameter optimisation to achieve high detection accuracy. This study highlights the potential of Bayesian optimisation as an effective technique to optimise hyper-parameters of deep learning networks for disease classification tasks.