<![CDATA[Freshwater fish diseases significantly affect aquaculture productivity and economic sustainability, while accurate visual classification remains challenging due to interclass similarity and image variability. This study presents a comparative evaluation of three deep learning architectures—DenseNet201, ResNet50, and EfficientNetV2-S—using a stepwise optimization strategy combined with Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) for freshwater fish disease classification. Models were trained through three phases: baseline, optimized, and fine-tuned. Performance was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), Cohen’s kappa, and per-class ROC–AUC. Results show consistent performance improvement across all architectures, with EfficientNetV2-S achieving the highest accuracy (97.14%), followed by ResNet50 (96.11%) and DenseNet201 (94.40%). High ROC–AUC values (>0.98) indicate strong discriminative capability. Grad-CAM analysis confirms that all optimized models focus on biologically relevant lesion regions, enhancing model transparency and reliability.]]>
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