Artificial Intelligence-Driven Eye Disease Classification Model

Eye diseases can result in various challenges and visual impairments. These diseases can affect an individual's quality of life and general health and well-being. The symptoms of eye diseases vary widely depending on the nature and severity of the disease. Early diagnosis can protect individuals from visual impairment. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based eye disease classification (EDC) assists physicians in providing effective patient services. However, the complexities of the fundus image affect the classifier's performance. There is a demand for a practical EDC for identifying eye diseases in the earlier stages. Thus, the author intends to build an EDC model using the deep learning (DL) technique. Denoising autoencoders are used to remove the noises and artifacts from the fundus images. The single-shot detection (SSD) approach generates the key features. The whale optimization algorithm (WOA) with Levy Flight and Wavelet search strategy is followed for selecting the features. In addition, the Adam optimizer (AO) is applied to fine-tune the ShuffleNet V2 model to classify the fundus images. Two benchmark datasets, ocular disease intelligent recognition (ODIR) and EDC datasets, are utilized for performance evaluation. The proposed EDC model achieved accuracy and Kappa values of 99.1 and 96.4, and 99.4 and 96.5, in the ODIR and EDC datasets, respectively. It outperformed the recent EDC models. The findings highlight the significance of the proposed EDC model in classifying eye diseases using complex fundus images. Healthcare centers can implement the proposed model to improve their standards and serve a more significant number of patients. In the future, the proposed model can be extended to identify a comprehensive range of eye diseases.