Empowering Diabetic Eye Disease Detection: Leveraging Differential Evolution for Optimized Convolution Neural Networks

Diabetic eye detection has become a major concern across the globe, which could be effectively addressed by automated detection using a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). CNN models have better detection and classification accuracy than other state-of-theart models. In this paper, a differential evolution (DE)-optimized CNN has been proposed for the single-step classification of diabetic retinopathy (DR) and glaucoma images. DE has been used to find out the optimized values of four hyper-parameters of CNN, i.e., the number of filters in the first layer, the filter size, the number. of convolution layers, and the number of strides. Simulation has been done using three publicly available datasets, and the accuracy obtained is 87.8%, 92.3%, and 88.7%, respectively, which outperforms other models. No other state-of-the-art model has used DE for hyper-parameter tuning in CNN models. Also, no other additional segmentation approach or handcrafted features have been used. The model has been kept simple to reduce computational costs.