Identification of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Weighted Fusion Deep Learning Based on Dual-Channel Fundus Scans

It is a well-known fact that diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most common causes of visual impairment between the ages of 25 and 74 around the globe. Diabetes is caused by persistently high blood glucose levels, which leads to blood vessel aggravations and vision loss. Early diagnosis can minimise the risk of proliferated diabetic retinopathy, which is the advanced level of this disease, and having higher risk of severe impairment. Therefore, it becomes important to classify DR stages. To this effect, this paper presents a weighted fusion deep learning network (WFDLN) to automatically extract features and classify DR stages from fundus scans. The proposed framework aims to treat the issue of low quality and identify retinopathy symptoms in fundus images. Two channels of fundus images, namely, the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) fundus images and the contrast-enhanced canny edge detection (CECED) fundus images are processed by WFDLN. Fundus-related features of CLAHE images are extracted by fine-tuned Inception V3, whereas the features of CECED fundus images are extracted using fine-tuned VGG-16. Both channels’ outputs are merged in a weighted approach, and softmax classification is used to determine the final recognition result. Experimental results show that the proposed network can identify the DR stages with high accuracy. The proposed method tested on the Messidor dataset reports an accuracy level of 98.5%, sensitivity of 98.9%, and specificity of 98.0%, whereas on the Kaggle dataset, the proposed model reports an accuracy level of 98.0%, sensitivity of 98.7%, and specificity of 97.8%. Compared with other models, our proposed network achieves comparable performance.