Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a prominent reason of blindness globally, which is a diagnostically challenging disease owing to the intricate process of its development and the human eye's complexity, which consists of nearly forty connected components like the retina, iris, optic nerve, and so on. This study proposes a novel approach to the identification of DR employing methods such as synthetic data generation, K- Means Clustering-Based Binary Grey Wolf Optimizer (KCBGWO), and Fully Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks (FCEDN). This is achieved using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate high-quality synthetic data and transfer learning for accurate feature extraction and classification, integrating these with Extreme Learning Machines (ELM). The substantial evaluation plan we have provided on the IDRiD dataset gives exceptional outcomes, where our proposed model gives 99.87% accuracy and 99.33% sensitivity, while its specificity is 99. 78%. This is why the outcomes of the presented study can be viewed as promising in terms of the further development of the proposed approach for DR diagnosis, as well as in creating a new reference point within the framework of medical image analysis and providing more effective and timely treatments.