Explainable AI Based Deep Ensemble Convolutional Learning for Multi-Categorical Ocular Disease Prediction

Abstract

Diseases of the eye such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and cataract remain among the leading causes of blindness and vision impairment worldwide. Diagnosis in its early stages followed by early treatment is crucial to preventing permanent loss of vision. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Transfer Learning and Explainable AI (XAI), have proven highly promising in automating the identification of retinal pathologies from medical images. In this paper, we propose an ensemble deep learning approach that integrates four pre-trained convolutional neural networks, i.e., VGG16, MobileNet, DenseNet, and InceptionV3, to classify retinal images into four categories: diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, cataracts, and normal. The ensemble method leverages the power of multiple models to improve classification accuracy. Additionally, Explainable AI techniques are applied to make the model more interpretable, with visual explanations and insights into AI system decision-making and thereby establishing clinical trust and reliability. The system is evaluated on a new benchmarked eye disease dataset used from Hugging Face, and the results in terms of accuracy and model transparency are encouraging. This research contributes towards developing reliable, explainable, and efficient AI-driven diagnostic systems to assist healthcare professionals in the early detection and management of eye diseases.