MidFusionEfficientV2: Improving Ophthalmic Diagnosis with Mid-Level RGB-LBP Fusion and SE Attention

Background/Objectives: Early diagnosis of eye diseases is critically important for enhancing individuals' quality of life and reducing the risk of vision loss. In this study, a deep learning-based hybrid model called MidFusionEfficientV2 has been proposed to classify eye diseases, including uveitis, conjunctivitis, cataract, eyelid drooping, and normal conditions. Methods: The model presents a dual-branch architecture that combines an RGB image branch with an EfficientNetV2-S architecture and a specialized texture branch based on Local Binary Pattern (LBP) transformation at an intermediate level. Thanks to the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks integrated into the LBP branch, channel-based attention mechanisms have been activated, enhancing the prominence of textural features. The features obtained from the RGB and LBP branches were combined at an intermediate level and transferred to the classification stage. Results: Experimental studies on the five-class eye disease dataset from the Mendeley Data platform have shown that the proposed model outperformed six strong models (ResNetV2, ConvNeXt, DenseNet-121, EfficientNet-B1, MobileNetV3 Large, and EfficientNetV2-S) with an accuracy of 98%. Especially in the difficult-to-diagnose uveitis class, recall and F1 scores of 97% and 94%, respectively, were achieved. Conclusions: The results show that a moderate combination of color and texture features significantly improves classification performance, and that MidFusionEfficientV2 offers a reliable and effective solution for the automatic diagnosis of eye diseases.