Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a significant vision-threatening condition, necessitating accurate and efficient automated screening methods. Traditional deep learning (DL) models struggle to detect subtle lesions and also suffer from high computational complexity. Existing models primarily mimic the primary visual cortex (V1) of the human visual system, neglecting other higher-order processing regions. To overcome these limitations, this research introduces the vision core-adapted network-based crossover osprey algorithm (VCANet-COP) for subtle lesion recognition with better computational efficiency. The model integrates sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to extract vascular structures and lesion-specific features at a pixel level for improved abnormality detection. The front-end network in the VCANet emulates the V1, V2, V4, and inferotemporal (IT) regions to derive subtle lesions effectively and improve lesion detection accuracy. Additionally, the COP algorithm leveraging the osprey optimization algorithm (OOA) with a crossover strategy optimizes hyperparameters and network configurations to ensure better computational efficiency, faster convergence, and enhanced performance in lesion recognition. The experimental assessment of the VCANet-COP model on multiple DR datasets namely Diabetic_Retinopathy_Data (DR-Data), Structured Analysis of the Retina (STARE) dataset, Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD), Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE) dataset, and Retinal fundus multi-disease image dataset (RFMID) demonstrates superior performance over baseline works, namely EDLDR, FFU_Net, LSTM_MFORG, fundus-DeepNet, and CNN_SVD by achieving average outcomes of 98.14% accuracy, 97.9% sensitivity, 98.08% specificity, 98.4% precision, 98.1% F1-score, 96.2% kappa coefficient, 2.0% false positive rate (FPR), 2.1% false negative rate (FNR), and 1.5-s execution time. By addressing critical limitations, VCANet-COP provides a scalable and robust solution for real-world DR screening and clinical decision support.