A Deep Learning Model for Detecting Diabetic Retinopathy Stages with Discrete Wavelet Transform

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the primary factor leading to vision impairment and blindness in diabetics. Uncontrolled diabetes can damage the retinal blood vessels. Initial detection and prompt medical intervention are vital in preventing progressive vision impairment. Today’s growing medical field presents a more significant workload and diagnostic demands on medical professionals. In the proposed study, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed to detect the stages of DR. This research is crucial for studying DR because of its innovative methodology incorporating two different public datasets. This strategy enhances the model’s capacity to generalize unseen DR images, as each dataset encompasses unique demographics and clinical circumstances. The network can learn and capture complicated hierarchical image features with asymmetric weights. Each image is preprocessed using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization and the discrete wavelet transform. The model is trained and validated using the combined datasets of Dataset for Diabetic Retinopathy and the Asia-Pacific Tele-Ophthalmology Society. The CNN model is tuned in with different learning rates and optimizers. An accuracy of 72% and an area under curve score of 0.90 was achieved by the CNN model with the Adam optimizer. The recommended study results may reduce diabetes-related vision impairment by early identification of DR severity.