A Lightweight Robust Deep Learning Model Gained High Accuracy in Classifying a Wide Range of Diabetic Retinopathy Images

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of diabetes mellitus, and retinal blood vessel damage can lead to vision loss and blindness if not recognized at an early stage. Manual DR detection using large fundus image data is time-consuming and error-prone. An effective automatic DR detection system can be significantly faster and potentially more accurate. This study aims to classify fundus images into five DR classes, using deep learning methods, with the highest possible accuracy and the lowest possible computational time. Three distinct DR datasets, APTOS, Messidor2, and IDRiD, are merged, resulting in 5,819 raw images. Before training the model, various image preprocessing techniques are applied to remove artifacts and noise from the images and improve their quality. Three augmentation…