The Detection and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy using the Architectures of Deep Learning

Abstract

Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy is a severe problem of long-term diabetes, which affects the human eye and gradually leading to permanent blindness. The early detection of DR is crucial for effective treatment, as symptoms often manifest in later stages. The manual grading of retinal images is time-consuming, prone to errors, and lacks patient-friendliness. In this study, we propose two deep learning (DL) architectures, a hybrid network combining VGG16 and XGBoost Classi- fier, and the DenseNet 121 network, for Diabetic retionopathy detection and classification. To evaluate the two DL models, we preprocessed a collection of retinal images obtained from the APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection Kaggle Dataset. This dataset exhibits not balanced image class distribution, which we addressed through appropriate balancing techniques. The performance of the considered models was assessed in terms of accuracy. The results showed that the hybrid network achieved an accuracy of 79.50%, while the DenseNet 121 model achieved an accuracy of 97.30%. Furthermore, a comparative analysis with existing methods utilizing the same dataset revealed the superior performance of the DenseNet 121 network. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of DL architectures for the early detection and classification of DR. The better performance of the DenseNet 121 model highlights its effectiveness in this domain. The implementation of such automated methods can sig- nificantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of DR diagnosis, benefiting both healthcare providers and patients.