Early Diabetic Retinopathy Cyber-Physical Detection System Using Attention-Guided Deep CNN Fusion

Diabetic retinopathy is the most common and severe eye complication of diabetes, and it can cause vision loss or even blindness due to retina damage. Automatic and faster detection of various DR stages is crucial and can benefit both patients and ophthalmologists. With the ubiquity of measurement devices and growing processing power, cyber-physical characterization is becoming an enabler technology in many disciplines. This paper proposes a cyber-physical system (CPS) framework that will aid clinicians in establishing an early diagnosis of DR. Particularly; we present a component-based CPS architecture to use a deep learning-based predictive model deployed on the cloud for effective DR diagnosis and incorporate medical devices. To this end, a deep learning-based explainable CNN fusion model has been introduced in the proposed framework for automatic screening and interpretation of DR stages using digital fundus images. We extract salient features using various fine-tuned CNN models in conjunction with an attention network, and we use a locally connected layer to calculate the weighted contribution of these networks. We measure the performance of our approach using a public dataset comprising fundus images of five different categories. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed approach's effectiveness for faster and more accurate detection of various DR stages.