Digital Retinal Fundus Imaging: An AI-Assisted Effective Machine Learning Model for Detecting Ocular Pathology

Ocular pathology is the study of employing digital fundus imaging to diagnose various eye-related diseases. Macular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy are among these eye diseases. To distinguish between these illnesses, a manual examination of the human eye is performed. Since the work is arduous, we have used many complex machine learning techniques in this paper to automatically identify eye disorders using digital retinal fundus imaging. In our initial stage, the dataset is de-noised to avoid misclassification. Additionally, we use Contrasted Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) to enhance the images. By adjusting the histograms' adaptive equalization parameters, it is possible to improve the fundus image on each of the RGB channels separately. With the help of three distinct deep CNN models; AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet50, high-quality features were extracted in the second phase. After merging the features, a composite feature vector was created. This is done to choose characteristics of superior quality. The Bag of Deep Features (BoDF) was used to choose features of the highest caliber. BoDF will assist in lowering the size of the feature so that it can be recognized quickly. Using Mutual Information (MI), comparable features were also eliminated. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree (DT) were then used to classify the model's output to identify ocular diseases. The STARE dataset is used in this research. When compared to current state-of-the-art models, the proposed model is more appropriate and provides an overall classification performance of 94.8% in almost 3 seconds.