TY  - EJOU
AU  - Tehsin, Sara 
AU  - Abbas, Muhammad John 
AU  - Nasir, Inzamam Mashood 
AU  - Alrowais, Fadwa 
AU  - Abualhamayel, Reham 
AU  - Yahya, Abdulsamad Ebrahim 
AU  - Marzouk, Radwa 

TI  - ECSA-Net: A Lightweight Attention-Based Deep Learning Model for Eye Disease Detection
T2  - Computers, Materials \& Continua

PY  - 2026
VL  - 87
IS  - 2
SN  - 1546-2226

AB  - Globally, diabetes and glaucoma account for a high number of people suffering from severe vision loss and blindness. To treat these vision disorders effectively, proper diagnosis must occur in a timely manner, and with conventional methods such as fundus photography, optical coherence tomography (OCT), and slit-lamp imaging, much depends on an expert’s interpretation of the images, making the systems very labor-intensive to operate. Moreover, clinical settings face difficulties with inter-observer variability and limited scalability with these diagnostic devices. To solve these problems, we have developed the Efficient Channel-Spatial Attention Network (ECSA-Net), a new deep learning-based methodology that integrates lightweight channel- and spatial-attention modules into a convolutional neural network. Ultimately, ECSA-Net improves the efficiency of computational resource use while enhancing discriminative feature extraction from retinal images. The ECSA-Net methodology was validated by conducting a series of classification accuracy tests using two publicly available eye disease datasets and was benchmark against a number of different pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. The results showed that the ECSA-Net achieved classification accuracies of 60.00% and 69.92%, respectively, while using only a compact architecture with 0.56 million parameters. This represents a reduction in parameter size by a factor of 14<mml:math id="mml-ieqn-1"><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:math> to 247<mml:math id="mml-ieqn-2"><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:math> compared to other pretrained models. Additionally, the attention modules added to the architecture significantly increased sensitivity to disease-relevant regions of the retina while maintaining low computational cost, making ECSA-Net a viable option for real-time clinical use. ECSA-Net is both efficient and accurate in automating the classification of eye diseases, combining high performance with the ethical considerations of medical artificial intelligence (AI) deployment. The ECSA-Net framework mitigates algorithmic bias in training datasets and protects individuals’ privacy and transparency in decision-making, thereby facilitating human-AI collaboration. The two areas of technical performance and ethical integration are needed for the responsible and scalable use of ECSA-Net in a variety of ophthalmic care settings.
KW  - Channel-spatial attention; explainable AI; eye disease classification; fairness in diagnostics; lightweight deep learning; transparency in healthcare

DO  - 10.32604/cmc.2026.076515