Impact of loss function in Deep Learning methods for accurate retinal vessel segmentation
Tecnologico de Monterrey（蒙特雷理工学院）；Hospital Sant Joan de Déu（圣胡安德迪乌斯医院）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Research Centre for Biomedical Engineering (CREB)（生物医学工程研究中心（CREB））
Daniela Herrera, Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz, Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza, Christian Mata
The retinal vessel network studied through fundus images contributes to the diagnosis of multiple diseases not only found in the eye. The segmentation of this system may help the specialized task of analyzing these images by assisting in the quantification of morphological characteristics. Due to its relevance, several Deep Learning-based architectures have been tested for tackling this problem automatically. However, the impact of loss function selection on the segmentation of the intricate retinal blood vessel system hasn't been systematically evaluated. In this work, we present the comparison of the loss functions Binary Cross Entropy, Dice, Tversky, and Combo loss using the deep learning architectures (i.e. U-Net, Attention U-Net, and Nested UNet) with the DRIVE dataset. Their performance is assessed using four metrics: the AUC, the mean squared error, the dice score, and the Hausdorff distance. The models were trained with the same number of parameters and epochs. Using dice score and AUC, the best combination was SA-UNet with Combo loss, which had an average of 0.9442 and 0.809 respectively. The best average of Hausdorff distance and mean square error were obtained using the Nested U-Net with the Dice loss function, which had an average of 6.32 and 0.0241 respectively. The results showed that there is a significant difference in the selection of loss function
The morphology of retinal blood vessels can indicate various diseases in the human body, and researchers have been working on automatic scanning and segmentation of retinal images to aid diagnosis. This project compares the performance of four neural network architectures in segmenting retinal images, using a combined dataset from different databases, namely the UNet, DR-VNet, UNet-ResNet and UNet-VGG.
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
The morphological attributes of retinal vessels, such as length, width, tortuosity and branching pattern and angles, play an important role in diagnosis, screening, treatment, and evaluation of various cardiovascular and ophthalmologic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and arteriosclerosis. The crucial step before extracting these morphological characteristics of retinal vessels from retinal fundus images is vessel segmentation. In this work, we propose a method for retinal vessel segmentation based on fully convolutional networks. Thousands of patches are extracted from each retinal ima…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
Retinal vessel segmentation from retinal images is an essential task for developing the computer-aided diagnosis system for retinal diseases. Efforts have been made on high-performance deep learning-based approaches to segment the retinal images in an end-to-end manner. However, the acquisition of retinal vessel images and segmentation labels requires onerous work from professional clinicians, which results in smaller training dataset with incomplete labels. As known, data-driven methods suffer from data insufficiency, and the models will easily over-fit the small-scale training data. Such a s…
Mentor, A Siemens Business（西门子旗下明导）；Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)（拉合尔管理科学大学（LUMS））
Retinal blood vessels are considered to be the reliable diagnostic biomarkers of ophthalmologic and diabetic retinopathy. Monitoring and diagnosis totally depends on expert analysis of both thin and thick retinal vessels which has recently been carried out by various artificial intelligent techniques. Existing deep learning methods attempt to segment retinal vessels using a unified loss function optimized for both thin and thick vessels with equal importance. Due to variable thickness, biased distribution, and difference in spatial features of thin and thick vessels, unified loss function are …
Cairo higher institute for engineering, computer sciences and management（开罗工程、计算机科学与管理高等学院）；Majmaah University（迈加马大学）；high institute of engineering Shock academy Cairo（开罗肖克学院工程高等学院）
Diabetic retinopathy is the basic reason for visual deficiency. This paper introduces a programmed strategy to identify and dispense with the blood vessels. The location of the blood vessels is the fundamental stride in the discovery of diabetic retinopathy because the blood vessels are the typical elements of the retinal picture. The location of the blood vessels can help the ophthalmologists to recognize the sicknesses prior and quicker. The blood vessels recognized and wiped out by utilizing Gobar filter on two freely accessible retinal databases which are STARE and DRIVE. The exactness of …
The accurate retinal vessel segmentation (RVS) is of great significance to assist doctors in the diagnosis of ophthalmology diseases and other systemic diseases. Manually designing a valid neural network architecture for retinal vessel segmentation requires high expertise and a large workload. In order to improve the performance of vessel segmentation and reduce the workload of manually designing neural network, we propose novel approach which applies neural architecture search (NAS) to optimize an encoder-decoder architecture for retinal vessel segmentation. A modified evolutionary algorithm …
MMM University of Technology（MMM理工大学）；National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur（哈米尔布尔国家理工学院）
Retinal blood vessels structure contains information about diseases like obesity, diabetes, hypertension and glaucoma. This information is very useful in identification and treatment of these fatal diseases. To obtain this information, there is need to segment these retinal vessels. Many kernel based methods have been given for segmentation of retinal vessels but their kernels are not appropriate to vessel profile cause poor performance. To overcome this, a new and efficient kernel based matched filter approach has been proposed. The new matched filter is used to generate the matched filter re…
Bahcesehir University（巴赫切谢希尔大学）；American University of Malta（马耳他美国大学）
Clinical screening with low-quality fundus images is challenging and significantly leads to misdiagnosis. This paper addresses the issue of improving the retinal image quality and vessel segmentation through retinal image restoration. More specifically, a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) with a convolution block attention module (CBAM) is used for retinal image restoration. A modified UNet is used for retinal vessel segmentation for the restored retinal images (CBAM-UNet). The proposed model consists of two generators and two discriminators. Generators translate image…
Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院）；Maynooth University（梅努斯大学）；St. James’s Hospital（圣詹姆斯医院）
Accurate retinal vessel segmentation is an important task for many computer-aided diagnosis systems. Yet, it is still a challenging problem due to the complex vessel structures of an eye. Numerous vessel segmentation methods have been proposed recently, however more research is needed to deal with poor segmentation of thin and tiny vessels. To address this, we propose a new deep learning pipeline combining the efficiency of residual dense net blocks and, residual squeeze and excitation blocks. We validate experimentally our approach on three datasets and show that our pipeline outperforms curr…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Topological and geometrical analysis of retinal blood vessel is a cost-effective way for early detection of many common diseases. Meanwhile, automated vessel segmentation and vascular tree analysis are still lacking in terms of generalization capability. In this work, we construct a novel benchmark RETA with 81 labeled vessel masks aiming to facilitate retinal vessel analysis. A semi-automated coarse-to-fine workflow is proposed to annotating vessel pixels. During dataset construction, we strived to control inter-annotator variability and intra-annotator variability by performing multi-stage a…
KIIT Deemed to be University（KIIT被视为大学）；Pandit Deendayal Energy University（潘迪特·迪恩达亚尔能源大学）
Inner Retinal neurons are a most essential part of the retina and they are supplied with blood via retinal vessels. This paper primarily focuses on the segmentation of retinal vessels using a triple preprocessing approach. DRIVE database was taken into consideration and preprocessed by Gabor Filtering, Gaussian Blur, and Edge Detection by Sobel and Pruning. Segmentation was driven out by 2 proposed U-Net architectures. Both the architectures were compared in terms of all the standard performance metrics. Preprocessing generated varied interesting results which impacted the results shown by the…
Automated segmentation of vascular map in retinal images endeavors a potential benefit in diagnostic procedure of different ocular diseases. In this paper, we suggest a new unsupervised retinal blood vessel segmentation approach using top-hat transformation, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), and 2-D Gabor wavelet filters. Initially, retinal image is preprocessed using top-hat morphological transformation followed by CLAHE to enhance only the blood vessel pixels in the presence of exudates, optic disc, and fovea. Then, multiscale 2-D Gabor wavelet filters are applied on …
Youtu Lab, Tencent（腾讯优图实验室）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息科学与工程学院）
Retinal artery/vein (A/V) classification plays a critical role in the clinical biomarker study of how various systemic and cardiovascular diseases affect the retinal vessels. Conventional methods of automated A/V classification are generally complicated and heavily depend on the accurate vessel segmentation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task deep neural network with spatial activation mechanism that is able to segment full retinal vessel, artery and vein simultaneously, without the pre-requirement of vessel segmentation. The input module of the network integrates the domain knowledge of w…
Segmentation of retinal vessel images is critical to the diagnosis of retinopathy. Recently, convolutional neural networks have shown significant ability to extract the blood vessel structure. However, it remains challenging to refined segmentation for the capillaries and the edges of retinal vessels due to thickness inconsistencies and blurry boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network for retinal vessel segmentation based on shared decoder and pyramid-like loss (SPNet) to address the above problems. Specifically, we introduce a decoder-sharing mechanism to capture multi…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Accurate retinal vessel segmentation is challenging because of the complex texture of retinal vessels and low imaging contrast. Previous methods generally refine segmentation results by cascading multiple deep networks, which are time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we propose two novel methods to address these challenges. First, we devise a light-weight module, named multi-scale residual similarity gathering (MRSG), to generate pixel-wise adaptive filters (PA-Filters). Different from cascading multiple deep networks, only one PA-Filter layer can improve the segmentation results. Sec…
Retinal vessel segmentation is of great interest for diagnosis of retinal vascular diseases. To further improve the performance of vessel segmentation, we propose IterNet, a new model based on UNet, with the ability to find obscured details of the vessel from the segmented vessel image itself, rather than the raw input image. IterNet consists of multiple iterations of a mini-UNet, which can be 4$\times$ deeper than the common UNet. IterNet also adopts the weight-sharing and skip-connection features to facilitate training; therefore, even with such a large architecture, IterNet can still learn …
A Novel Hybrid Approach for Retinal Vessel Segmentation with Dynamic Long-Range Dependency and Multi-Scale Retinal Edge Fusion Enhancement
School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）；NHC Key Lab of Hormones and Development and Tianjin Key Lab of Metabolic Diseases（国家卫生健康委员会激素与发育重点实验室和天津代谢疾病重点实验室）；Tianjin Medical University Chu Hsien-I Memorial Hospital & Institute of Endocrinology（天津医科大学楚生一纪念医院及内分泌研究所）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）
Many deep learning based methods have been proposed for retinal vessel segmentation, however few of them focus on the connectivity of segmented vessels, which is quite important for a practical computer-aided diagnosis system on retinal images. In this paper, we propose an efficient network to address this problem. A U-shape network is enhanced by introducing a semantics-guided module, which integrates the enriched semantics information to shallow layers for guiding the network to explore more powerful features. Besides, a recursive refinement iteratively applies the same network over the prev…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Accurate retinal vessel segmentation is a challenging problem in color fundus image analysis. An automatic retinal vessel segmentation system can effectively facilitate clinical diagnosis and ophthalmological research. Technically, this problem suffers from various degrees of vessel thickness, perception of details, and contextual feature fusion. For addressing these challenges, a deep learning based method has been proposed and several customized modules have been integrated into the well-known encoder-decoder architecture U-net, which is mainly employed in medical image segmentation. Structu…
Cixi Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Ningbo Institute of Industrial Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院宁波工业技术研究院慈溪生物医学工程研究所）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California（南加州大学凯克医学院）；First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University（温州医科大学附属第一医院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT-A) is a non-invasive imaging technique, and has been increasingly used to image the retinal vasculature at capillary level resolution. However, automated segmentation of retinal vessels in OCT-A has been under-studied due to various challenges such as low capillary visibility and high vessel complexity, despite its significance in understanding many eye-related diseases. In addition, there is no publicly available OCT-A dataset with manually graded vessels for training and validation. To address these issues, for the first time in the field of reti…
Recently, many methods based on hand-designed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved promising results in automatic retinal vessel segmentation. However, these CNNs remain constrained in capturing retinal vessels in complex fundus images. To improve their segmentation performance, these CNNs tend to have many parameters, which may lead to overfitting and high computational complexity. Moreover, the manual design of competitive CNNs is time-consuming and requires extensive empirical knowledge. Herein, a novel automated design method, called Genetic U-Net, is proposed to generate a U…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；Eötvös Loránd University（厄特沃什·罗兰大学）；Shenyang Aerospace University（沈阳航空航天大学）
Retinal vessel segmentation plays an imaportant role in the field of retinal image analysis because changes in retinal vascular structure can aid in the diagnosis of diseases such as hypertension and diabetes. In recent research, numerous successful segmentation methods for fundus images have been proposed. But for other retinal imaging modalities, more research is needed to explore vascular extraction. In this work, we propose an efficient method to segment blood vessels in Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) retinal images. Inspired by U-Net, "feature map reuse" and residual learning, we pro…
Computer Science Department, Henry Samueli School of Engineering Stein Eye Institute, David Geffen School of Medicine University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
The reliable segmentation of retinal vasculature can provide the means to diagnose and monitor the progression of a variety of diseases affecting the blood vessel network, including diabetes and hypertension. We leverage the power of convolutional neural networks to devise a reliable and fully automated method that can accurately detect, segment, and analyze retinal vessels. In particular, we propose a novel, fully convolutional deep neural network with an encoder-decoder architecture that employs dilated spatial pyramid pooling with multiple dilation rates to recover the lost content in the e…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
The precise detection of blood vessels in retinal images is crucial to the early diagnosis of the retinal vascular diseases, e.g., diabetic, hypertensive and solar retinopathies. Existing works often fail in predicting the abnormal areas, e.g, sudden brighter and darker areas and are inclined to predict a pixel to background due to the significant class imbalance, leading to high accuracy and specificity while low sensitivity. To that end, we propose a novel error attention refining network (ERA-Net) that is capable of learning and predicting the potential false predictions in a two-stage mann…
Retinal blood vessel can assist doctors in diagnosis of eye-related diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, and its segmentation is particularly important for automatic retinal image analysis. However, it is challenging to segment these vessels structures, especially the thin capillaries from the color retinal image due to low contrast and ambiguousness. In this paper, we propose pyramid U-Net for accurate retinal vessel segmentation. In pyramid U-Net, the proposed pyramid-scale aggregation blocks (PSABs) are employed in both the encoder and decoder to aggregate features at higher, current…
Deakin University（迪肯大学）；COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡通信卫星大学）
Over recent years, increasingly complex approaches based on sophisticated convolutional neural network architectures have been slowly pushing performance on well-established benchmark datasets. In this paper, we take a step back to examine the real need for such complexity. We present RC-Net, a fully convolutional network, where the number of filters per layer is optimized to reduce feature overlapping and complexity. We also used skip connections to keep spatial information loss to a minimum by keeping the number of pooling operations in the network to a minimum. Two publicly available retina…
Eötvös Loránd University（罗兰大学）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院）；Qinghai University（青海大学）
Reliable segmentation of retinal vessels can be employed as a way of monitoring and diagnosing certain diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, as they affect the retinal vascular structure. In this work, we propose the Residual Spatial Attention Network (RSAN) for retinal vessel segmentation. RSAN employs a modified residual block structure that integrates DropBlock, which can not only be utilized to construct deep networks to extract more complex vascular features, but can also effectively alleviate the overfitting. Moreover, in order to further improve the representation capability of t…
Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University（福建农林大学）；Digital Fujian Research Institute of Big Data for Agriculture and Forestry（数字福建农林大数据研究院）
Accurate segmentation of the blood vessels of the retina is an important step in clinical diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases. Many deep learning frameworks have come up for retinal blood vessels segmentation tasks. However, the complex vascular structure and uncertain pathological features make the blood vessel segmentation still very challenging. A novel U-shaped network named Multi-module Concatenation which is based on Atrous convolution and multi-kernel pooling is put forward to retinal vessels segmentation in this paper. The proposed network structure retains three layers the essential stru…
Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学模式识别实验室）；Department of Ophthalmology, Universitätsklinikum Erlangen（埃尔朗根大学医院眼科）
Ophthalmological imaging utilizes different imaging systems, such as color fundus, infrared, fluorescein angiography, optical coherence tomography (OCT) or OCT angiography. Multiple images with different modalities or acquisition times are often analyzed for the diagnosis of retinal diseases. Automatically aligning the vessel structures in the images by means of multi-modal registration can support the ophthalmologists in their work. Our method uses a convolutional neural network to extract features of the vessel structure in multi-modal retinal images. We jointly train a keypoint detection an…
Vessel segmentation in fundus is a key diagnostic capability in ophthalmology, and there are various challenges remained in this essential task. Early approaches indicate that it is often difficult to obtain desirable segmentation performance on thin vessels and boundary areas due to the imbalance of vessel pixels with different thickness levels. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream Meticulous-Processing Network (MP-Net) for tackling this problem. To pay more attention to the thin vessels and boundary areas, we firstly propose an efficient hierarchical model automatically stratifies th…
Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院微电子研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Retinal vessel segmentation based on deep learning requires a lot of manual labeled data. That is time-consuming, laborious and professional. What is worse, the acquisition of abundant fundus images is difficult. These problems are more serious due to the presence of abnormalities, varying size and shape of the vessels, non-uniform illumination and anatomical changes. In this paper, we propose a data-efficient semi-supervised learning framework, which effectively combines the existing deep learning network with GAN and self-training ideas. In view of the difficulty of tuning hyper-parameters o…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Hospital of the Peoples Liberation Army Joint Logistics Support Force（中国人民解放军联勤保障部队医院）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；Shenyang Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院沈阳计算技术研究所）
Retinal vessel segmentation is a vital step for the diagnosis of many early eye-related diseases. In this work, we propose a new deep learning model, namely Channel Attention Residual U-Net (CAR-UNet), to accurately segment retinal vascular and non-vascular pixels. In this model, we introduced a novel Modified Efficient Channel Attention (MECA) to enhance the discriminative ability of the network by considering the interdependence between feature maps. On the one hand, we apply MECA to the "skip connections" in the traditional U-shaped networks, instead of simply copying the feature maps of th…
College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）；Department of Computing, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院计算系）
Retinal vessel segmentation, as a principal nonintrusive diagnose method for ophthalmology diseases or diabetics, suffers from data scarcity due to requiring pixel-wise labels. In this paper, we proposed a convenient patch-based two-stage transfer method. First, based on the information bottleneck theory, we insert one dimensionality-reduced layer for task-specific feature space. Next, the semi-supervised clustering is conducted to select instances, from different sources databases, possessing similarities in the feature space. Surprisingly, we empirically demonstrate that images from differen…
University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；Istanbul Medipol University（伊斯坦布尔梅迪波尔大学）；University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）
The vascular structure of blood vessels is important in diagnosing retinal conditions such as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Accurate segmentation of these vessels can help in detecting retinal objects such as the optic disc and optic cup and hence determine if there are damages to these areas. Moreover, the structure of the vessels can help in diagnosing glaucoma. The rapid development of digital imaging and computer-vision techniques has increased the potential for developing approaches for segmenting retinal vessels. In this paper, we propose an approach for segmenting retinal vessels t…
Retinal Vessel Segmentation with Deep Graph and Capsule Reasoning
Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Huzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学长三角研究院（湖州））；School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学生命科学与技术学院）；University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）
Retinal vessel segmentation is a fundamental step in screening, diagnosis, and treatment of various cardiovascular and ophthalmic diseases. Robustness is one of the most critical requirements for practical utilization, since the test images may be captured using different fundus cameras, or be affected by various pathological changes. We investigate this problem from a data augmentation perspective, with the merits of no additional training data or inference time. In this paper, we propose two new data augmentation modules, namely, channel-wise random Gamma correction and channel-wise random v…
Central South University（中南大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Changsha Aier Eye Hospital（长沙爱尔眼科医院）
Objective: Recognizing retinal vessel abnormity is vital to early diagnosis of ophthalmological diseases and cardiovascular events. However, segmentation results are highly influenced by elusive vessels, especially in low-contrast background and lesion region. In this work, we present an end-to-end synthetic neural network, containing a symmetric equilibrium generative adversarial network (SEGAN), multi-scale features refine blocks (MSFRB), and attention mechanism (AM) to enhance the performance on vessel segmentation. Method: The proposed network is granted powerful multi-scale representation…
Retinal Vessel Segmentation is important for the diagnosis of various diseases. The research on retinal vessel segmentation focuses mainly on the improvement of the segmentation model which is usually based on U-Net architecture. In our study, we use the U-Net architecture and we rely on heavy data augmentation in order to achieve better performance. The success of the data augmentation relies on successfully addressing the problem of input images. By analyzing input images and performing the augmentation accordingly we show that the performance of the U-Net model can be increased dramatically…
Accurate segmentation of retinal vessels is a basic step in Diabetic retinopathy(DR) detection. Most methods based on deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) have small receptive fields, and hence they are unable to capture global context information of larger regions, with difficult to identify lesions. The final segmented retina vessels contain more noise with low classification accuracy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a DCNN structure named as D-Net. In the proposed D-Net, the dilation convolution is used in the backbone network to obtain a larger receptive field without losing spati…
FS-Net: Full Scale Network and Adaptive Threshold for Improving Extraction of Micro-Retinal Vessel Structures
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech)（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院（斯科尔泰克））；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRI)（人工智能研究院（AIRI））；University of Sharjah（沙迦大学）；Bian Que AI（扁鹊人工智能）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences（医学与健康科学研究院）
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Airdoc；NVIDIA AI Technology Center（英伟达人工智能技术中心）
Retinal vessel segmentation plays a key role in computer-aided screening, diagnosis, and treatment of various cardiovascular and ophthalmic diseases. Recently, deep learning-based retinal vessel segmentation algorithms have achieved remarkable performance. However, due to the domain shift problem, the performance of these algorithms often degrades when they are applied to new data that is different from the training data. Manually labeling new data for each test domain is often a time-consuming and laborious task. In this work, we explore unsupervised domain adaptation in retinal vessel segmen…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）
The precise segmentation of retinal blood vessels is of great significance for early diagnosis of eye-related diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. In this work, we propose a lightweight network named Spatial Attention U-Net (SA-UNet) that does not require thousands of annotated training samples and can be utilized in a data augmentation manner to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. SA-UNet introduces a spatial attention module which infers the attention map along the spatial dimension, and multiplies the attention map by the input feature map for adaptive feature refin…
RBAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Retinal Vessels Branching Angle Detection
School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算与增强智能学院）；Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所）；School of Computing, Clemson University（克莱姆森大学计算学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院电气与计算机工程系）
We present a cascade deep neural network to segment retinal vessels in volumetric optical coherence tomography (OCT). Two types of knowledge are infused into the network for confining the searching regions. (1) Histology. The retinal vessels locate between the inner limiting membrane and the inner nuclear layer of human retina. (2) Imaging. The red blood cells inside the vessels scatter the OCT probe light forward and form projection shadows on the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer, which is avascular thus perfect for localizing the retinal vessel in transverse plane. Qualitative and quan…
Peking University（北京大学）；Peking University First Hospital（北京大学第一医院）；MGH/BWH Center for Clinical Data Science（麻省总医院/布莱根妇女医院临床数据科学中心）
Segmenting coronary arteries is challenging, as classic unsupervised methods fail to produce satisfactory results and modern supervised learning (deep learning) requires manual annotation which is often time-consuming and can some time be infeasible. To solve this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer based shape-consistent generative adversarial network (SC-GAN), which is an annotation-free approach that uses the knowledge from publicly available annotated fundus dataset to segment coronary arteries. The proposed network is trained in an end-to-end fashion, generating and segmenting synthe…
Overview of Deep Learning Methods for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
The Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia（塞尔维亚人工智能研发研究所）；University of Novi Sad（诺维萨德大学）；The Faculty of Technical Sciences（技术科学学院）
Bioinformatics Institute（生物信息学研究所）；Universitat Rovira i Virgili（罗维拉-威尔吉利大学）
In this paper, we propose an efficient blood vessel segmentation method for the eye fundus images using adversarial learning with multiscale features and kernel factorization. In the generator network of the adversarial framework, spatial pyramid pooling, kernel factorization and squeeze excitation block are employed to enhance the feature representation in spatial domain on different scales with reduced computational complexity. In turn, the discriminator network of the adversarial framework is formulated by combining convolutional layers with an additional squeeze excitation block to differe…
In this study, a supervised retina blood vessel segmentation process was performed on the green channel of the RGB image using artificial neural network (ANN). The green channel is preferred because the retinal vessel structures can be distinguished most clearly from the green channel of the RGB image. The study was performed using 20 images in the DRIVE data set which is one of the most common retina data sets known. The images went through some preprocessing stages like contrastlimited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), color intensity adjustment, morphological operations and median an…
Retinal vessel segmentation is a crucial step in diagnosing and screening various diseases, including diabetes, ophthalmologic diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method for vessel segmentation in color fundus images using encoder-decoder based octave convolution networks. Compared with other convolution networks utilizing standard convolution for feature extraction, the proposed method utilizes octave convolutions and octave transposed convolutions for learning multiple-spatial-frequency features, thus can better capture retinal vasculat…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Shenzhen People’s Hospital（深圳市人民医院）；Jinan University（暨南大学）
Vascular segmentation extracts blood vessels from images and serves as the basis for diagnosing various diseases, like ophthalmic diseases. Ophthalmologists often require high-resolution segmentation results for analysis, which leads to super-computational load by most existing methods. If based on low-resolution input, they easily ignore tiny vessels or cause discontinuity of segmented vessels. To solve these problems, the paper proposes an algorithm named SuperVessel, which gives out high-resolution and accurate vessel segmentation using low-resolution images as input. We first take super-re…
Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学））；ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学）ITER学院）；Center for the Internet of Things, ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学）ITER学院物联网中心）
Extracting blood vessels from retinal fundus images plays a decisive role in diagnosing the progression in pertinent diseases. In medical image analysis, vessel extraction is a semantic binary segmentation problem, where blood vasculature needs to be extracted from the background. Here, we present an image enhancement technique based on the morphological preprocessing coupled with a scaled U-net architecture. Despite a relatively less number of trainable network parameters, the scaled version of U-net architecture provides better performance compare to other methods in the domain. We validated…
