Optimized convolutional neural network-based comprehensive early diagnosis method for multiple eye disease recognition

The multilabel classification method (MCM) is an active and effective research area in image analysis for the detection of various diseases. MCM provides insights and assistance to ophthalmologists in the detection of eye disease at an early stage. We propose comprehensive age-related eye disease detection at an early stage using retinal fundus images that were taken from the online public dataset. The flower pollination optimization algorithm was used for the optimization of the hyperparameters of the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), which increased the speed and accuracy of the network. Initially, training was performed using the public datasets. The overall improvement in training accuracy (7.5%) was achieved using the optimized method compared with the nonoptimized method. Then, the output of the DCNN was applied to a multiclass support vector machine for the classification of eye diseases. The performance of the proposed method was compared with that of the other optimization techniques with the help of the standard performance measures, namely accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, precision, and F1-score. Upon comparing the performance of the proposed method with that of the nonoptimized DCNN in terms of performance measures, it had an improvement in the detection accuracy of 9.62% for AMD, 3.57% for glaucoma, 6.59% for normal, 7.71% for DR, and 11.75% for cataract. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.