Enhancing Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Accuracy through Dual Attention Mechanism in Deep Learning

Automatic classification of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) can assist ophthalmologists in devising personalized treatment plans, making it a critical component of clinical practice. However, imbalanced data distribution in the dataset becomes a bottleneck in the generalization of deep learning models trained for DR classification. In this work, we combine global attention block (GAB) and category attention block (CAB) into the deep learning model, thus effectively overcoming the imbalanced data distribution problem in DR classification. Our proposed approach is based on an attention mechanism-based deep learning model that employs three pre-trained networks, namely, MobileNetV3-small, Efficientnet-b0, and DenseNet-169 as the backbone architecture. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets of retinal fundoscopy images for DR. Experimental results show that on the APTOS dataset, the DenseNet-169 yielded 83.20% mean accuracy, followed by the MobileNetV3-small and EfficientNet-b0, which yielded 82% and 80% accuracies, respectively. On the EYEPACS dataset, the EfficientNet-b0 yielded a mean accuracy of 80%, while the DenseNet-169 and MobileNetV3-small yielded 75.43% and 76.68% accuracies, respectively. In addition, we also compute the F1-score of 82.0%, precision of 82.1%, sensitivity of 83.0%, specificity of 95.5%, and a kappa score of 88.2% for the experiments. Moreover, in our work, the MobileNetV3-small has 1.6 million parameters on the APTOS dataset and 0.90 million parameters on the EYEPACS dataset, which is comparatively less than other methods. The proposed approach achieves competitive performance that is at par with recently reported works on DR classification.