AI-aided cardiovascular disease diagnosis in cattle from retinal images: Machine learning vs. deep learning models

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in animals can severely impact the heart and circulatory systems, like those in humans. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial for improving animal welfare and lifespan. Traditional diagnostic methods face challenges such as insufficient anamnesis information, high costs of biochemical and hematological tests, and increasing data complexity. This study aims to address these issues by developing AI-based diagnostic systems for fast and accurate CVD diagnosis in cattle using retinal images. A total of 1118 retinal images from 100 cattle were collected, with 52 diagnosed with CVD and 48 as non-CVD. The dataset is publicly available on Kaggle. We evaluated three machine learning methods (Extreme Learning Machine, K-Nearest Neighbors, and Support Vector Machine) and four deep learning models (DenseNet201, ResNet101, SqueezeNet, and InceptionV3) for their diagnostic capabilities. ResNet101 emerged as the most effective model, achieving an accuracy of 96.1 ± 3.15 %, sensitivity of 97.3 ± 2.96 %, specificity of 94.9 ± 4.07 %, and an F1-score of 96.4 ± 0.03. This study demonstrates that AI-based systems, particularly deep learning models, can significantly improve the accuracy of CVD diagnosis in animals, marking a critical advancement in veterinary healthcare.