Attention-based deep learning framework to recognize diabetes disease from cellular retinal images

Abstract

A medical disorder known as diabetic retinopathy (DR) affects people who suffer from diabetes. Many people are visually impaired due to DR. Primary cause of DR in patients is high blood sugar, and it affects blood vessels available in the retinal cell. The recent advancement in deep learning and computer vision methods, and their automation applications can recognize the presence of DR in retinal cells and vessel images. Authors have proposed an attention-based hybrid model to recognize diabetes in early stage to prevent harmful clauses. Proposed methodology uses DenseNet121 architecture for convolution learning and then, the feature vector will be enhanced with channel and spatial attention model. The proposed architecture also simulates binary and multiclass classification to recognize the infection and the spreading of disease. Binary classification recognizes DR images either positive or negative, while multiclass classification represents an infection on a scale of 0–4. Simulation of the proposed methodology has achieved 98.57% and 99.01% accuracy for multiclass and binary classification, respectively. Simulation of the study also explored the impact of data augmentation to make the proposed model robust and generalized. Attention-based deep learning model has achieved remarkable accuracy to detect diabetic infection from retinal cellular images.