A computer-aided diagnosis system for detecting various diabetic retinopathy grades based on a hybrid deep learning technique

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a serious disease that may cause vision loss unawares without any alarm. Therefore, it is essential to scan and audit the DR progress continuously. In this respect, deep learning techniques achieved great success in medical image analysis. Deep convolution neural network (CNN) architectures are widely used in multi-label (ML) classification. It helps in diagnosing normal and various DR grades: mild, moderate, and severe non-proliferative DR (NPDR) and proliferative DR (PDR). DR grades are formulated by appearing multiple DR lesions simultaneously on the color retinal fundus images. Many lesion types have various features that are difficult to segment and distinguished by utilizing conventional and hand-crafted methods. Therefore, the practical solution is to utilize an effective CNN model. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid, deep learning technique, which is called E-DenseNet. We integrated EyeNet and DenseNet models based on transfer learning. We customized the traditional EyeNet by inserting the dense blocks and optimized the resulting hybrid E-DensNet model's hyperparameters. The proposed system based on the E-DenseNet model can accurately diagnose healthy and different DR grades from various small and large ML color fundus images. We trained and tested our model on four different datasets that were published from 2006 to 2019. The proposed system achieved an average accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE), Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), the quadratic Kappa score (QKS), and the calculation time (T) in minutes (m) equal [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], 0.883, and 3.5m respectively. The experiments show promising results as compared with other systems.