Automated dual CNN-based feature extraction with SMOTE for imbalanced diabetic retinopathy classification

The primary cause of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is high blood sugar due to long-term diabetes. Early and correct diagnosis of the DR is essential for timely and effective treatment. Despite high performance of recently developed models, there is still a need to overcome the problem of class imbalance issues and feature extraction to achieve accurate results. To resolve this problem, we have presented an automated model combining the customized ResNet-50 and EfficientNetB0 for detecting and classifying DR in fundus images. The proposed model addresses class imbalance using data augmentation and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) for oversampling the training data and enhances the feature extraction process through fine-tuned ResNet50 and EfficientNetB0 models with ReLU activations and global average pooling. Combining extracted features and then passing it to four different classifiers effectively captures both local and global spatial features, thereby improving classification accuracy for diabetic retinopathy. For Experiment, The APTOS 2019 Dataset is used, and it contains of 3662 high-quality fundus images. The performance of the proposed model is assessed using several metrics, and the findings are compared with contemporary methods for diabetic retinopathy detection. The suggested methodology demonstrates substantial enhancement in diabetic retinopathy diagnosis for fundus pictures. The proposed automated model attained an accuracy of 98.5% for binary classification and 92.73% for multiclass classification.