TY  - EJOU
AU  - Anvesh, Kachi 
AU  - Reshmi, Bharati M. 
AU  - Hariharan, Shanmugasundaram 
AU  - Reddy, H. Venkateshwara 
AU  - Krishnamoorthy, Murugaperumal 
AU  - Kukreja, Vinay 
AU  - Chen, Shih-Yu 

TI  - A Novel Approach Deep Learning Framework for Automatic Detection of Diseases in Retinal Fundus Images
T2  - Computer Modeling in Engineering \& Sciences

PY  - 2025
VL  - 143
IS  - 2
SN  - 1526-1506

AB  - Automated classification of retinal fundus images is essential for identifying eye diseases, though there is earlier research on applying deep learning models designed especially for detecting tessellation in retinal fundus images. This study classifies 4 classes of retinal fundus images with 3 diseased fundus images and 1 normal fundus image, by creating a refined VGG16 model to categorize fundus pictures into tessellated, normal, myopia, and choroidal neovascularization groups. The approach utilizes a VGG16 architecture that has been altered with unique fully connected layers and regularization using dropouts, along with data augmentation techniques (rotation, flip, and rescale) on a dataset of 302 photos. Training involves class weighting and critical callbacks (early halting, learning rate reduction, checkpointing) to maximize performance. Gains in accuracy (93.42% training, 77.5% validation) and improved class-specific F1 scores are attained. Grad-CAM’s Explainable AI (XAI) highlights areas of the images that are important for each categorization, making it interpretable for better understanding of medical experts. These results highlight the model’s potential as a helpful diagnostic tool in ophthalmology, providing a clear and practical method for the early identification and categorization of retinal disorders, especially in cases such as tessellated fundus images.
KW  - Deep Learning; choroidal neovascularization; myopia; tessellation; deep learning; overfitting

DO  - 10.32604/cmes.2025.063239