Application of Deep Learning Framework for Early Prediction of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a severe microvascular complication of diabetes that affects the eyes, leading to progressive damage to the retina and potential vision loss. Timely intervention and detection are crucial for preventing irreversible damage. With the advancement of technology, deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful tool in medical diagnostics, offering a promising solution for the early prediction of DR. This study compares four convolutional neural network architectures, DenseNet201, ResNet50, VGG19, and MobileNetV2, for predicting DR. The evaluation is based on both accuracy and training time data. MobileNetV2 outperforms other models, with a validation accuracy of 78.22%, and ResNet50 has the shortest training time (15.37 s). These findings emphasize the trade-off between model accuracy and computational efficiency, stressing MobileNetV2’s potential applicability for DR prediction due to its balance of high accuracy and a reasonable training time. Performing a 5-fold cross-validation with 100 repetitions, the ensemble of MobileNetV2 and a Graph Convolution Network exhibits a validation accuracy of 82.5%, significantly outperforming MobileNetV2 alone, which shows a 5-fold validation accuracy of 77.4%. This superior performance is further validated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) metric, demonstrating the enhanced capability of the ensemble method in accurately detecting diabetic retinopathy. This suggests its competence in effectively classifying data and highlights its robustness across multiple validation scenarios. Moreover, the proposed clustering approach can find damaged locations in the retina using the developed Isolate Regions of Interest method, which achieves almost a 90% accuracy. These findings are useful for researchers and healthcare practitioners looking to investigate efficient and effective powerful models for predictive analytics to diagnose diabetic retinopathy.