An enumerative pre-processing approach for retinopathy severity grading using an interpretable classifier: a comparative study

BackgroundDiabetic retinopathy (DR) is a serious eye complication that results in permanent vision damage. As the number of patients suffering from DR increases, so does the delay in treatment for DR diagnosis. To bridge this gap, an efficient DR screening system that assists clinicians is required. Although many artificial intelligence (AI) screening systems have been deployed in recent years, accuracy remains a metric that can be improved.MethodsAn enumerative pre-processing approach is implemented in the deep learning model to attain better accuracies for DR severity grading. The proposed approach is compared with various pre-trained models, and the necessary performance metrics were tabulated. This paper also presents the comparative analysis of various optimization algorithms that are utilized in the deep network model, and the results were outlined.ResultsThe experimental results are carried out on the MESSIDOR dataset to assess the performance. The experimental results show that an enumerative pipeline combination K1-K2-K3-DFNN-LOA shows better results when compared with other combinations. When compared with various optimization algorithms and pre-trained models, the proposed model has better performance with maximum accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and macro-averaged metric of 97.60%, 94.60%, 98.40%, 94.60%, and 0.97, respectively.ConclusionThis study focussed on developing and implementing a DR screening system on color fundus photographs. This artificial intelligence-based system offers the possibility to enhance the efficacy and approachability of DR diagnosis.