A hybrid deep learning framework for early detection of diabetic retinopathy using retinal fundus images

Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly impacted medical image processing domain, enabling sophisticated and accurate diagnostic tools. This paper presents a novel hybrid deep learning framework that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for diabetic retinopathy (DR) early detection and progression monitoring using retinal fundus images. Utilizing the sequential nature of disease progression, the proposed method integrates temporal information across multiple retinal scans to enhance detection accuracy. The proposed model utilizes publicly available DRIVE and Kaggle diabetic retinopathy datasets to evaluate the performance. The benchmark datasets provide a diverse set of annotated retinal images and the proposed hybrid model employs a CNN to extract spatial features from retinal images. The spatial feature extraction is enhanced by multi-scale feature extraction to capture fine details and broader patterns. These enriched spatial features are then fed into an RNN with attention mechanism to capture temporal dependencies so that most relevant data aspects can be considered for analysis. This combined approach enables the model to consider both current and previous states of the retina, improving its ability to detect subtle changes indicative of early-stage DR. Proposed model experimental evaluation demonstrate the superior performance over traditional deep learning models like CNN, RNN, InceptionV3, VGG19 and LSTM in terms of both sensitivity and specificity, achieving 97.5% accuracy on the DRIVE dataset, 94.04% on the Kaggle dataset, 96.9% on the Eyepacs Dataset. This research work not only advances the field of automated DR detection but also provides a framework for utilizing temporal information in medical image analysis.