Smart grading of diabetic retinopathy: an intelligent recommendation-based fine-tuned EfficientNetB0 framework

Diabetic retinopathy is a condition that affects the retina and causes vision loss due to blood vessel destruction. The retina is the layer of the eye responsible for visual processing and nerve signaling. Diabetic retinopathy causes vision loss, floaters, and sometimes blindness; however, it often shows no warning signals in the early stages. Deep learning-based techniques have emerged as viable options for automated illness classification as large-scale medical imaging datasets have become more widely available. To adapt to medical image analysis tasks, transfer learning makes use of pre-trained models to extract high-level characteristics from natural images. In this research, an intelligent recommendation-based fine-tuned EfficientNetB0 model has been proposed for quick and precise assessment for the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy from fundus images, which will help ophthalmologists in early diagnosis and detection. The proposed EfficientNetB0 model is compared with three transfer learning-based models, namely, ResNet152, VGG16, and DenseNet169. The experimental work is carried out using publicly available datasets from Kaggle consisting of 3,200 fundus images. Out of all the transfer learning models, the EfficientNetB0 model has outperformed with an accuracy of 0.91, followed by DenseNet169 with an accuracy of 0.90. In comparison to other approaches, the proposed intelligent recommendation-based fine-tuned EfficientNetB0 approach delivers state-of-the-art performance on the accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score criteria. The system aims to assist ophthalmologists in early detection, potentially alleviating the burden on healthcare units.