DRD-Net: Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis Using A Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) has become a leading cause of blindness among diabetic patients. Accurate and timely diagnosis of DR is critical to slowing disease progression. This research proposes a Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model, named Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Network (DRD-Net). The proposed DRD-Net designed to enhance diagnostic accuracy by addressing key challenges such as gradient vanishing and lesion scale variability in fundus images. Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) was used to enhance contrast and highlight lesions in fundus images. To increase the diversity of training samples, the proposed framework employs geometric data augmentation techniques. DRD-Net incorporates the Swish activation function along with densely connected blocks to mitigate gradient vanishing and enhancing feature propagation within the network. Additionally, the model integrates two Inception blocks to facilitate multiscale feature extraction, which is essential for detecting small Regions of Interest (RoI) in fundus images. Experimental results demonstrate that DRD-Net achieves a precision of 84.4%, recall of 84.5%, F1-score of 84.1%, and accuracy of 85.1%, outperforming several state-of-the-art models on the IDRiD dataset. These results highlight DRD-Net’s potential as an effective solution for automated DR diagnosis, contributing to more efficient and accurate DR screening.