Sophisticated Ensemble Deep Learning Approaches for Multilabel Retinal Disease Classification in Medical Imaging

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel ensemble Deep learning (DL)-based Multi-Label Retinal Disease Classification (MLRDC) system, known for its high accuracy and efficiency. Utilising a stacking ensemble approach, and integrating DenseNet201, EfficientNetB4, EfficientNetB3 and EfficientNetV2S models, exceptional performance in retinal disease classification is achieved. The proposed MLRDC model, leveraging DL as the meta-model, outperforms individual base detectors, with DenseNet201 and EfficientNetV2S achieving an accuracy of 96.5%, precision of 98.6%, recall of 97.1%, and F1 score of 97.8%. Weighted multilabel classifiers in the ensemble exhibit an average accuracy of 90.6%, precision of 98.3%, recall of 91.2%, and F1 score of 94.6%, whereas unweighted models achieve an average accuracy of 90%, precision of 98.6%, recall of 93.1%, and F1 score of 95.7%. Employing Logistic Regression (LR) as the meta-model, the proposed MLRDC system achieves an accuracy of 93.5%, precision of 98.2%, recall of 93.9%, and F1 score of 96%, with a minimal loss of 0.029. These results highlight the superiority of the proposed model over benchmark state-of-the-art ensembles, emphasising its practical applicability in medical image classification.