An ensemble approach for classification of diabetic retinopathy in fundus image

Diabetes-oriented diabetic retinopathy impacts the blood vessels in the region of the retina to enlarge and leak blood and other fluids. In most cases, diabetic retinopathy affects both eyes. If left untreated, it would eventually lead to blindness. Diabetic Retinopathy is so widespread that around 93 million adults are affected by it on a worldwide scale. Early identification and treatment would reduce the danger of serious diabetic retinopathy visual impairment. To achieve early detection, we can make use of our advancement in image processing to diagnose how severely the patient is affected by diabetic retinopathy. Using a patient’s fundus image and modern deep learning methods, we will be able to classify the result into five categories of severity: unaffected, severe, mild, moderate, and proliferate. Based on the results, the doctor would be able to determine what type of treatment is required to further avoid vision loss. The strategy outlined in this work is to employ five well-known deep learning models, namely Inception ResNet V2, VGG19, Xception, ResNet50, DenseNet112, and integrate their outcomes successfully utilizing ensemble learning. The experimentation outcome displays that the proposed approach classifies all the classes of Diabetic Retinopathy and performs better compared to other methods with a Specificity of 92.02%. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.