Diabetic retinopathy severity detection using an improved Whale optimization algorithm and convolutional Kolmogorov-Arnold network

Introduction: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an inflammatory condition affecting the retina caused by elevated and unregulated blood glucose levels. On a global scale, it is a contributing factor to vision impairment. Several deep learning (DL) methods use retinal images to identify DR severity. However, a significant improvement is required to assist medical professionals in recognizing DR in its early phases. Methods: Thus, the author introduced a method based on the DL technique to determine the DR severity grades using retinal images. A ShuffleNet V2 model with vision transformers' (ViT) attention mechanism was used to extract the features. An improved Whale optimization method (IWO) was used to fine-tune the feature extraction model. We employed a convolutional Kolmogorov-Arnold Network to categorize the DR severity using the extracted features. The EyePACS dataset was utilized to train the proposed DR severity grading model using a five-fold cross-validation strategy. We generalized the model on the Messidor-2 dataset. Results: The findings revealed an average accuracy of 93.84% on the MESSIDOR-2 dataset, demonstrating a substantial improvement in detecting DR using the fundus images. Discussion: Furthermore, the model demands minimal processing resources to generate the outcomes, leading to the deployment of the proposed DR severity detection model in healthcare facilities with limited computational resources.