AI-Based Automatic Detection and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy Using U-Net and Deep Learning

Artificial intelligence is widely applied to automate Diabetic retinopathy diagnosis. Diabetes-related retinal vascular disease is one of the world’s most common leading causes of blindness and vision impairment. Therefore, automated DR detection systems would greatly benefit the early screening and treatment of DR and prevent vision loss caused by it. Researchers have proposed several systems to detect abnormalities in retinal images in the past few years. However, Diabetic Retinopathy automatic detection methods have traditionally been based on hand-crafted feature extraction from the retinal images and using a classifier to obtain the final classification. DNN (Deep neural networks) have made several changes in the previous few years to assist overcome the problem mentioned above. We suggested a two-stage novel approach for automated DR classification in this research. Due to the low fraction of positive instances in the asymmetric Optic Disk (OD) and blood vessels (BV) detection system, preprocessing and data augmentation techniques are used to enhance the image quality and quantity. The first step uses two independent U-Net models for OD (optic disc) and BV (blood vessel) segmentation. In the second stage, the symmetric hybrid CNN-SVD model was created after preprocessing to extract and choose the most discriminant features following OD and BV extraction using Inception-V3 based on transfer learning, and detects DR by recognizing retinal biomarkers such as MA (microaneurysms), HM (hemorrhages), and exudates (EX). On EyePACS-1, Messidor-2, and DIARETDB0, the proposed methodology demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, with an average accuracy of 97.92%, 94.59%, and 93.52%, respectively. Extensive testing and comparisons with baseline approaches indicate the efficacy of the suggested methodology.