Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a diabetes-related ocular complication that can lead to vision loss. Its detection is performed through fundus examinations, assisted by lesion segmentation techniques. The IDRiD and APTOS-2019 datasets are used for DR lesion segmentation and classification, respectively. Using the U-Net architecture, lesions such as microaneurysms and exudates were segmented, while CNNs classified disease stages. In this paper, we present DR-AIVis, an approach for segmentation, classification, and explainability of diabetic retinopathy (DR). Our results demonstrate an accuracy of 93.84% in segmentation and 98.30% in classification. Additionally, we employ Grad-CAM to highlight the most relevant regions of the image. As contributions, our work includes an automated system for DR segmentation and classification, as well as a mechanism to identify the most important image regions for decision-making, thereby enhancing confidence in the provided results using Grad-CAM.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abdi, H., Williams, L.J.: Newman-keuls test and tukey test. Encyclopedia Res. Des. 1–11 (2010)
Alghamdi, H.S.: Towards explainable deep neural networks for the automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy. Appl. Sci. 12(19), 9435 (2022)
Bishop, C.M., Nasrabadi, N.M.: Pattern recognition and machine learning, vol. 4. Springer (2006)
Brazilian Council of Ophthalmology: Brazilian Council of Ophthalmology - Official Website (2024). https://www.cbo.net.br
Chen, Z., Xu, L., Zhang, Y.: Image denoising using attention-residual convolutional neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.07713 (2021), https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07713, Accessed 22 Dec 2024
Crick, R.P., Khaw, P.T.: Textbook Of Clinical Ophthalmology, A: A Practical Guide To Disorders Of The Eyes And Their Management. World Scientific Publishing Company (2003)
El-Ateif, S., Idri, A.: Single-modality and joint fusion deep learning for diabetic retinopathy diagnosis. Sci. African 17, e01280 (2022)
Group, E.T.D.R.S.R., et al.: Grading diabetic retinopathy from stereoscopic color fundus photographs-an extension of the modified airlie house classification: Etdrs Rep. number 10. Ophthalmology 98(5), 786–806 (1991)
Ibtehaz, N., Rahman, M.S.: Multiresunet: rethinking the u-net architecture for multimodal biomedical image segmentation. Neural Netw. 121, 74–87 (2020)
Kaggle: Aptos 2019 blindness detection (2019). https://www.kaggle.com/c/aptos2019-blindness-detection/data
Khalifa, N.E.M., Loey, M., Taha, M.H.N., Mohamed, H.N.E.T.: Deep transfer learning models for medical diabetic retinopathy detection. Acta Inf. Medica 27(5), 327 (2019)
Murugappan, M., Prakash, N., Jeya, R., Mohanarathinam, A., Hemalakshmi, G., Mahmud, M.: A novel few-shot classification framework for diabetic retinopathy detection and grading. Measurement 200, 111485 (2022)
Nazih, W., Aseeri, A.O., Atallah, O.Y., El-Sappagh, S.: Vision transformer model for predicting the severity of diabetic retinopathy in fundus photography-based retina images. IEEE Access 11, 117546–117561 (2023)
Porwal, P., et al.: Idrid: diabetic retinopathy-segmentation and grading challenge. Med. Image Anal. 59, 101561 (2020)
Russakovsky, O., et al.: Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge. Int. J. Comput. Vision 115(3), 211–252 (2015)
Selvaraju, R.R., Cogswell, M., Das, A., Vedantam, R., Parikh, D., Batra, D.: Grad-cam: visual explanations from deep networks via gradient-based localization. Presented at the (2017)
Silva, E., Souza, A., Costa, F.: Analysis of noise reduction techniques in magnetic resonance images. CBEB 2014 - Brazilian Congress of Biomedical Engineering (2014)
Taufiqurrahman, S., Handayani, A., Hermanto, B.R., Mengko, T.L.E.R.: In: Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Using a Hybrid and Efficient Mobilenetv2-svm Model, pp. 235–240. IEEE (2020)
Teo, Z.L., et al.: Global prevalence of diabetic retinopathy and projection of burden through 2045: systematic review and meta-analysis. Ophthalmology 128(11), 1580–1591 (2021)
Ting, D.S.W., Cheung, G.C.M., Wong, T.Y.: Diabetic retinopathy: global prevalence, major risk factors, screening practices and public health challenges: a review. Clin. Exp. Ophthalmol. 44(4), 260–277 (2016)
Acknowledgment
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. Also, Pedro Pedrosa Rebouças Filho acknowledges the sponsorship from the Brazilian National Council for Research and Development (CNPq) via Grant 301455/2022-8 and State Foundation for the Support of Scientific and Technological Development (FUNCAP) for the financial support via grants 08/2023 and 09/2023.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2026 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
da Silva, M.C., Silva, C.M., da Silva, S.P.P., Sarmento, R.M., Song, H.H., Filho, P.P.R. (2026). DR-AIVis: A Hybrid Approach for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using U-Net Segmentation and CNN Classification with Grad-CAM Explainability. In: de Freitas, R., Furtado, D. (eds) Intelligent Systems. BRACIS 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 16181. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15990-8_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15990-8_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-032-15989-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-032-15990-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)Springer Nature Proceedings Computer Science
