Multi‐Class Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy Diseases From Fundus Images Using Criss‐Cross Attention Based Deep Residual Squeeze and Excitation Assisted Vision Transformer Model

ABSTRACT The early detection of diabetic retinopathy (DR) illnesses improves diagnosis and lowers the risk of permanent blindness. As a result, screening for DR in fundus images is an important method used to diagnose diabetes and other eye diseases. However, detecting diseases manually requires a significant amount of time and work. Deep learning (DL) techniques have produced encouraging results in categorizing fundus images. Still, the multi‐class DR disease remains a difficult task. Thus, the proposed framework adopted a novel Criss‐Cross Attention‐Based Squeeze‐and‐Excitation Assisted Vision Transformer (CCA‐SE‐ViT) model to classify DR from fundus images. Initially, the defective region of the retina is segmented using a novel dilated depth‐wise separable convolutional U‐Net model (dDSC‐UNet). Then, using the segmented regions, the fundus images are classified into multiple classes as age‐related macular degeneration (AMD), DR, glaucoma, cataracts, myopia, hypertension, normal, other abnormalities, and DR cases are classified into no DR, mild, moderate, severe, and proliferative DR, respectively. The retinal fundus images are obtained from publicly available datasets like OIA‐ODIR and APTOS 2019. The proposed methodology for multi‐class categorization of retinal illnesses in the OIA‐ODIR dataset yielded 97.2% accuracy, 96.7% precision, 96.1% recall, 95.9% F 1‐score, and 96.4% specificity. The APTOS dataset was used for multi‐class classification of DR illnesses, and the results were 99.68% accuracy, 99.08% precision, 99.31% recall, 99.19% F 1‐score, and 99.26% specificity. The results demonstrated that the proposed method accurately identifies DR using retinal fundus images.