A Deformable Network with Attention Mechanism for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The intensive application of deep learning in medical image processing has facilitated the advancement of automatic retinal vessel segmentation research.To overcome the limitation that traditional U-shaped vessel segmentation networks fail to extract features in fundus image sufficiently,we propose a novel network(DSeU-net)based on deformable convolution and squeeze excitation residual module.The deformable convolution is utilized to dynamically adjust the receptive field for the feature extraction of retinal vessel.And the squeeze excitation residual module is used to scale the weights of the low-level features so that the network learns the complex relationships of the different feature layers efficiently.We validate the DSeU-net on three public retinal vessel segmentation datasets including DRIVE,CHASEDB1,and STARE,and the experimental results demonstrate the satisfactory segmentation performance of the network.

SepFE:Separable Fusion Enhanced Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The accurate and automatic segmentation of retinal vessels fromfundus images is critical for the early diagnosis and prevention ofmany eye diseases,such as diabetic retinopathy(DR).Existing retinal vessel segmentation approaches based on convolutional neural networks(CNNs)have achieved remarkable effectiveness.Here,we extend a retinal vessel segmentation model with low complexity and high performance based on U-Net,which is one of the most popular architectures.In view of the excellent work of depth-wise separable convolution,we introduce it to replace the standard convolutional layer.The complexity of the proposed model is reduced by decreasing the number of parameters and calculations required for themodel.To ensure performance while lowering redundant parameters,we integrate the pre-trained MobileNet V2 into the encoder.Then,a feature fusion residual module(FFRM)is designed to facilitate complementary strengths by enhancing the effective fusion between adjacent levels,which alleviates extraneous clutter introduced by direct fusion.Finally,we provide detailed comparisons between the proposed SepFE and U-Net in three retinal image mainstream datasets(DRIVE,STARE,and CHASEDB1).The results show that the number of SepFE parameters is only 3%of U-Net,the Flops are only 8%of U-Net,and better segmentation performance is obtained.The superiority of SepFE is further demonstrated through comparisons with other advanced methods.

Blood Vessel Segmentation with Classification Model for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening

Biomedical image processing is finding useful in healthcare sector for the investigation,enhancement,and display of images gathered by distinct imaging technologies.Diabetic retinopathy(DR)is an illness caused by diabetes complications and leads to irreversible injury to the retina blood vessels.Retinal vessel segmentation techniques are a basic element of automated retinal disease screening system.In this view,this study presents a novel blood vessel segmentation with deep learning based classification(BVS-DLC)model forDRdiagnosis using retinal fundus images.The proposed BVS-DLC model involves different stages of operations such as preprocessing,segmentation,feature extraction,and classification.Primarily,the proposed model uses the median filtering(MF)technique to remove the noise that exists in the image.In addition,a multilevel thresholding based blood vessel segmentation process using seagull optimization(SGO)with Kapur’s entropy is performed.Moreover,the shark optimization algorithm(SOA)with Capsule Networks(CapsNet)model with softmax layer is employed for DR detection and classification.Awide range of simulations was performed on the MESSIDOR dataset and the results are investigated interms of different measures.The simulation results ensured the better performance of the proposed model compared to other existing techniques interms of sensitivity,specificity,receiver operating characteristic(ROC)curve,accuracy,and F-score.

DT-Net:Joint Dual-Input Transformer and CNN for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Retinal vessel segmentation in fundus images plays an essential role in the screening,diagnosis,and treatment of many diseases.The acquired fundus images generally have the following problems:uneven illumination,high noise,and complex structure.It makes vessel segmentation very challenging.Previous methods of retinal vascular segmentation mainly use convolutional neural networks on U Network(U-Net)models,and they have many limitations and shortcomings,such as the loss of microvascular details at the end of the vessels.We address the limitations of convolution by introducing the transformer into retinal vessel segmentation.Therefore,we propose a hybrid method for retinal vessel segmentation based on modulated deformable convolution and the transformer,named DT-Net.Firstly,multi-scale image features are extracted by deformable convolution and multi-head selfattention(MHSA).Secondly,image information is recovered,and vessel morphology is refined by the proposed transformer decoder block.Finally,the local prediction results are obtained by the side output layer.The accuracy of the vessel segmentation is improved by the hybrid loss function.Experimental results show that our method obtains good segmentation performance on Specificity(SP),Sensitivity(SE),Accuracy(ACC),Curve(AUC),and F1-score on three publicly available fundus datasets such as DRIVE,STARE,and CHASE_DB1.

Intelligent Machine Learning Enabled Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation and Classification

Automated segmentation of blood vessels in retinal fundus images is essential for medical image analysis.The segmentation of retinal vessels is assumed to be essential to the progress of the decision support system for initial analysis and treatment of retinal disease.This article develops a new Grasshopper Optimization with Fuzzy Edge Detection based Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation and Classification(GOFED-RBVSC)model.The proposed GOFED-RBVSC model initially employs contrast enhancement process.Besides,GOAFED approach is employed to detect the edges in the retinal fundus images in which the use of GOA adjusts the membership functions.The ORB(Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF)feature extractor is exploited to generate feature vectors.Finally,Improved Conditional Variational Auto Encoder(ICAVE)is utilized for retinal image classification,shows the novelty of the work.The performance validation of the GOFEDRBVSC model is tested using benchmark dataset,and the comparative study highlighted the betterment of the GOFED-RBVSC model over the recent approaches.

MIA-UNet:Multi-Scale Iterative Aggregation U-Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

As an important part of the new generation of information technology,the Internet of Things(IoT)has been widely concerned and regarded as an enabling technology of the next generation of health care system.The fundus photography equipment is connected to the cloud platform through the IoT,so as to realize the realtime uploading of fundus images and the rapid issuance of diagnostic suggestions by artificial intelligence.At the same time,important security and privacy issues have emerged.The data uploaded to the cloud platform involves more personal attributes,health status and medical application data of patients.Once leaked,abused or improperly disclosed,personal information security will be violated.Therefore,it is important to address the security and privacy issues of massive medical and healthcare equipment connecting to the infrastructure of IoT healthcare and health systems.To meet this challenge,we propose MIA-UNet,a multi-scale iterative aggregation U-network,which aims to achieve accurate and efficient retinal vessel segmentation for ophthalmic auxiliary diagnosis while ensuring that the network has low computational complexity to adapt to mobile terminals.In this way,users do not need to upload the data to the cloud platform,and can analyze and process the fundus images on their own mobile terminals,thus eliminating the leakage of personal information.Specifically,the interconnection between encoder and decoder,as well as the internal connection between decoder subnetworks in classic U-Net are redefined and redesigned.Furthermore,we propose a hybrid loss function to smooth the gradient and deal with the imbalance between foreground and background.Compared with the UNet,the segmentation performance of the proposed network is significantly improved on the premise that the number of parameters is only increased by 2%.When applied to three publicly available datasets:DRIVE,STARE and CHASE DB1,the proposed network achieves the accuracy/F1-score of 96.33%/84.34%,97.12%/83.17%and 97.06%/84.10%,respectively.The experimental results show that the MIA-UNet is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.

Modified Anam-Net Based Lightweight Deep Learning Model for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The accurate segmentation of retinal vessels is a challenging taskdue to the presence of various pathologies as well as the low-contrast ofthin vessels and non-uniform illumination. In recent years, encoder-decodernetworks have achieved outstanding performance in retinal vessel segmentation at the cost of high computational complexity. To address the aforementioned challenges and to reduce the computational complexity, we proposea lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN)-based encoder-decoderdeep learning model for accurate retinal vessels segmentation. The proposeddeep learning model consists of encoder-decoder architecture along withbottleneck layers that consist of depth-wise squeezing, followed by fullconvolution, and finally depth-wise stretching. The inspiration for the proposed model is taken from the recently developed Anam-Net model, whichwas tested on CT images for COVID-19 identification. For our lightweightmodel, we used a stack of two 3 × 3 convolution layers (without spatialpooling in between) instead of a single 3 × 3 convolution layer as proposedin Anam-Net to increase the receptive field and to reduce the trainableparameters. The proposed method includes fewer filters in all convolutionallayers than the original Anam-Net and does not have an increasing numberof filters for decreasing resolution. These modifications do not compromiseon the segmentation accuracy, but they do make the architecture significantlylighter in terms of the number of trainable parameters and computation time.The proposed architecture has comparatively fewer parameters (1.01M) thanAnam-Net (4.47M), U-Net (31.05M), SegNet (29.50M), and most of the otherrecent works. The proposed model does not require any problem-specificpre- or post-processing, nor does it rely on handcrafted features. In addition,the attribute of being efficient in terms of segmentation accuracy as well aslightweight makes the proposed method a suitable candidate to be used in thescreening platforms at the point of care. We evaluated our proposed modelon open-access datasets namely, DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB. Theexperimental results show that the proposed model outperforms several stateof-the-art methods, such as U-Net and its variants, fully convolutional network (FCN), SegNet, CCNet, ResWNet, residual connection-based encoderdecoder network (RCED-Net), and scale-space approx. network (SSANet) in terms of {dice coefficient, sensitivity (SN), accuracy (ACC), and the areaunder the ROC curve (AUC)} with the scores of {0.8184, 0.8561, 0.9669, and0.9868} on the DRIVE dataset, the scores of {0.8233, 0.8581, 0.9726, and0.9901} on the STARE dataset, and the scores of {0.8138, 0.8604, 0.9752,and 0.9906} on the CHASE_DB dataset. Additionally, we perform crosstraining experiments on the DRIVE and STARE datasets. The result of thisexperiment indicates the generalization ability and robustness of the proposedmodel.

Fast interactive volume rendering method for adjustable vessel segmentation visualization

Medical diagnosis software and computer-assisted surgical systems often use segmented image data to help clinicians make decisions. The segmentation extracts the region of interest from the background, which makes the visualization clearer. However, no segmentation method can guarantee accurate results under all circumstances. As a result, the clinicians need a solution that enables them to check and validate the segmentation accuracy as well as displaying the segmented area without ambiguities. With the method presented in this paper, the real CT or MR image is displayed within the segmented region and the segmented boundaries can be expanded or contracted interactively. By this way, the clinicians are able to check and validate the segmentation visually and make more reliable decisions. After experiments with real data from a hospital, the presented method is proved to be suitable for efficiently detecting segmentation errors. The new algorithm uses new graphic processing uint （GPU） shading functions recently introduced in graphic cards and is fast enough to interact oil the segmented area, which was not possible with previous methods.

MF~2ResU-Net:a multi-feature fusion deep learning architecture for retinal blood vessel segmentation

Objective For computer-aided Chinese medical diagnosis and aiming at the problem of insufficient segmentation,a novel multi-level method based on the multi-scale fusion residual neural network(MF2ResU-Net)model is proposed.Methods To obtain refined features of retinal blood vessels,three cascade connected UNet networks are employed.To deal with the problem of difference between the parts of encoder and decoder,in MF2ResU-Net,shortcut connections are used to combine the encoder and decoder layers in the blocks.To refine the feature of segmentation,atrous spatial pyramid pooling(ASPP)is embedded to achieve multi-scale features for the final segmentation networks.Results The MF2ResU-Net was superior to the existing methods on the criteria of sensitivity(Sen),specificity(Spe),accuracy(ACC),and area under curve(AUC),the values of which are 0.8013 and 0.8102,0.9842 and 0.9809,0.9700 and 0.9776,and 0.9797 and 0.9837,respectively for DRIVE and CHASE DB1.The results of experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the model in the segmentation of complex curvature and small blood vessels.Conclusion Based on residual connections and multi-feature fusion,the proposed method can obtain accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels by refining the segmentation features,which can provide another diagnosis method for computer-aided Chinese medical diagnosis.

A Transformer-Assisted Cascade Learning Network for Choroidal Vessel Segmentation

As a highly vascular eye part,the choroid is crucial in various eye disease diagnoses.However,limited research has focused on the inner structure of the choroid due to the challenges in obtaining sufficient accurate label data,particularly for the choroidal vessels.Meanwhile,the existing direct choroidal vessel segmentation methods for the intelligent diagnosis of vascular assisted ophthalmic diseases are still unsatisfactory due to noise data,while the synergistic segmentation methods compromise vessel segmentation performance for the choroid layer segmentation tasks.Common cascaded structures grapple with error propagation during training.To address these challenges,we propose a cascade learning segmentation method for the inner vessel structures of the choroid in this paper.Specifically,we propose TransformerAssisted Cascade Learning Network(TACLNet)for choroidal vessel segmentation,which comprises a two-stage training strategy:pre-training for choroid layer segmentation and joint training for choroid layer and choroidal vessel segmentation.We also enhance the skip connection structures by introducing a multi-scale subtraction connection module designated as MSC,capturing differential and detailed information simultaneously.Additionally,we implement an auxiliary Transformer branch named ATB to integrate global features into the segmentation process.Experimental results exhibit that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance for choroidal vessel segmentation.Besides,we further validate the significant superiority of the proposed method for retinal fluid segmentation in optical coherence tomography(OCT)scans on a publicly available dataset.All these fully prove that our TACLNet contributes to the advancement of choroidal vessel segmentation and is of great significance for ophthalmic research and clinical application.

Multiscale attention network via topology learning for cerebral vessel segmentation in angiography images

Cerebrovascular diseases are a widespread threat to human health.The accurate extraction of cerebral vessel structures is of paramount importance in the diagnosis and treatment of cerebrovascular diseases.However,the complexity of cerebral vessel structures and the low imaging contrast present significant challenges for vessel segmentation.Therefore,we propose a Multiscale Attention Network based on topological learning to extract vessel structures from angiographic images.This method employs a Multiscale Squeeze Attention(MSA)module for channel-wise attention learning,extracting multiscale attention feature maps from angiographic images.To maintain the topological connectivity of vessel segmentation,we introduced the clDice loss function to enforce skeleton connectivity of vessel segmentation.We conducted an experimental analysis of the proposed method using a publicly available cerebral vessel dataset.The results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a sensitivity score of 0.8507 and a dice score of 0.8669 for cerebrovascular segmentation,enabling accurate and complete extraction of vascular structures.The proposed method was extended to coronary angiography images.The results show that the proposed method can accurately extract coronary structures,proving its broad applicability to other vascular segmentation tasks.

3D pulmonary vessel segmentation based on improved residual attention u-net

Automatic segmentation of pulmonary vessels is a fundamental and essential task for the diagnosis of various pulmonary vessels diseases.The accuracy of segmentation is suffering from the complex vascular structure.In this paper,an Improved Residual Attention U-Net(IRAU-Net)aiming to segment pulmonary vessel in 3D is proposed.To extract more vessel structure information,the Squeeze and Excitation(SE)block is embedded in the down sampling stage.And in the up sampling stage,the global attention module(GAM)is used to capture target features in both high and low levels.These two stages are connected by Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling(ASPP)which can sample in various receptive fields with a low computational cost.By the evaluation experiment,the better performance of IRAU-Net on the segmentation of terminal vessel is indicated.It is expected to provide robust support for clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Automated retinal blood vessels segmentation based on simplified PCNN and fast 2D-Otsu algorithm

According to the characteristics of dynamic firing in pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) and regional configuration in retinal blood vessel network, a new method combined with simplified PCNN and fast 2D-Otsu algorithm was proposed for automated retinal blood vessels segmentation. Firstly, 2D Gaussian matched filter was used to enhance the retinal images and simplified PCNN was employed to segment the blood vessels by firing neighborhood neurons. Then, fast 2D-Otsu algorithm was introduced to search the best segmentation results and iteration times with less computation time. Finally, the whole vessel network was obtained via analyzing the regional connectivity. Experiments implemented on the public Hoover database indicate that this new method gets a 0.803 5 true positive rate and a 0.028 0 false positive rate on an average. According to the test results, compared with Hoover algorithm and method of PCNN and 1D-Otsu, the proposed method shows much better performance.

Encoding-decoding Network With Pyramid Self-attention Module for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Retina vessel segmentation is a vital step in diagnosing ophthalmologic diseases. Traditionally, ophthalmologists segment retina vessels by hand, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Thus, more and more researchers are committed to the research of automatic segmentation algorithms. With the development of convolution neural networks(CNNs), many tasks can be solved by CNNs.In this paper, we propose an encoding-decoding network with a pyramid self-attention module(PSAM) to segment retinal vessels. The network follows a U shape structure, and it comprises stacked feature selection blocks(FSB) and a PSAM. The proposed FSB consists of two convolution blocks with the same weight and a channel-wise attention block. At the head of the network, we apply a PSAM consisting of three parallel self-attention modules to capture long-range dependence of different scales. Due to the power of PSAM and FSB, the performance of the network improves. We have evaluated our model on two public datasets: DRIVE and CHASE;B1. The results show the performance of our model is better than other methods. The F1, Accuracy, and area under curve(AUC) are 82.21%/80.57%,95.65%/97.02%, and 98.16%/98.46% on DRIVE and CHASE;B1, respectively.

A saliency and Gaussian net model for retinal vessel segmentation

Retinal vessel segmentation is a significant problem in the analysis of fundus images.A novel deep learning structure called the Gaussian net(GNET)model combined with a saliency model is proposed for retinal vessel segmentation.A saliency image is used as the input of the GNET model replacing the original image.The GNET model adopts a bilaterally symmetrical structure.In the left structure,the first layer is upsampling and the other layers are max-pooling.In the right structure,the final layer is max-pooling and the other layers are upsampling.The proposed approach is evaluated using the DRIVE database.Experimental results indicate that the GNET model can obtain more precise features and subtle details than the UNET models.The proposed algorithm performs well in extracting vessel networks,and is more accurate than other deep learning methods.Retinal vessel segmentation can help extract vessel change characteristics and provide a basis for screening the cerebrovascular diseases.

Dual-Branch-UNet: A Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In intelligent perception and diagnosis of medical equipment,the visual and morphological changes in retinal vessels are closely related to the severity of cardiovascular diseases(e.g.,diabetes and hypertension).Intelligent auxiliary diagnosis of these diseases depends on the accuracy of the retinal vascular segmentation results.To address this challenge,we design a Dual-Branch-UNet framework,which comprises a Dual-Branch encoder structure for feature extraction based on the traditional U-Net model for medical image segmentation.To be more explicit,we utilize a novel parallel encoder made up of various convolutional modules to enhance the encoder portion of the original U-Net.Then,image features are combined at each layer to produce richer semantic data and the model’s capacity is adjusted to various input images.Meanwhile,in the lower sampling section,we give up pooling and conduct the lower sampling by convolution operation to control step size for information fusion.We also employ an attentionmodule in the decoder stage to filter the image noises so as to lessen the response of irrelevant features.Experiments are verified and compared on the DRIVE and ARIA datasets for retinal vessels segmentation.The proposed Dual-Branch-UNet has proved to be superior to other five typical state-of-the-art methods.

Analysis of normal human retinal vascular network architecture using multifractal geometry

AIM：To apply the multifractal analysis method as a quantitative approach to a comprehensive description of the microvascular network architecture of the normal human retina.METHODS：Fifty volunteers were enrolled in this study in the Ophthalmological Clinic of Cluj-Napoca,Romania,between January 2012 and January 2014. A set of 100 segmented and skeletonised human retinal images,corresponding to normal states of the retina were studied. An automatic unsupervised method for retinal vessel segmentation was applied before multifractal analysis. The multifractal analysis of digital retinal images was made with computer algorithms,applying the standard boxcounting method. Statistical analyses were performed using the Graph Pad In Stat software.RESULTS：The architecture of normal human retinal microvascular network was able to be described using the multifractal geometry. The average of generalized dimensions（D_q）for q=0,1,2,the width of the multifractal spectrum（Δα=α_（max）-α_（min））and the spectrum arms＇ heights difference（│Δf│）of the normal images were expressed as mean±standard deviation（SD）：for segmented versions,D_0=1.7014±0.0057; D_1=1.6507±0.0058; D_2=1.5772±0.0059; Δα=0.92441±0.0085; │Δf│= 0.1453±0.0051; for skeletonised versions,D_0=1.6303±0.0051; D_1=1.6012±0.0059; D_2=1.5531± 0.0058; Δα=0.65032±0.0162; │Δf│= 0.0238±0.0161. The average of generalized dimensions（D_q）for q=0,1,2,the width of the multifractal spectrum（Δα）and the spectrum arms＇ heights difference（│Δf│）of the segmented versions was slightly greater than the skeletonised versions.CONCLUSION：The multifractal analysis of fundus photographs may be used as a quantitative parameter for the evaluation of the complex three-dimensional structure of the retinal microvasculature as a potential marker for early detection of topological changes associated with retinal diseases.

Separation of cortical arteries and veins in optical neurovascular imaging

Separation of arteries and veins in the cerebral cortex is of significant importance in the studies of cortical hemodynamics,such as the changes of cerebral blood flow,perfusion or oxygen con-centration in arteries and veins under different pathological and physiological conditions.Yet the cerebral vessel segmentation and vessel-type separation are challenging due to the complexity of cortical vessel characteristics and low spatial signal-to-noise ratio.In this work,we presented an effective full-field method to differentiate arteries and veins in cerebral cortex using dual-modal optical imaging technology including laser speckle imaging(LSI)and optical intrinsic signals(OIS)imaging.The raw contrast images were acquired by LSI and processed with enhanced laser speckle contrast analysis(eLASCA),algorithm.The vascular pattern was extracted and seg-mented using region growing algorithm from the eLASCA-based LSI.Meanwhile,OIS imageswere acquired altermatively with 630 and 870 nm to obtain an oxy hemoglobin concentration mapover cerebral cortex.Then the separation of arteries and veins was accomplished by Otsuthreshold segmentation algorithm based on the OIS information and segmentation of LSI.Finally,the segmentation and separation performances were assessed using area overlap measure(AOM).The segmentation and separation of cerebral vessels in cortical optical imaging have great potential applications in full-field cerebral hemodynamics monitoring and pathological study of cerebral vascular diseases,as well as in clinical intraoperative monitoring.

Self-supervised segmentation using synthetic datasets via L-system

Vessel segmentation plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of many diseases,as well as assisting surgery.With the development of deep learning,many segmentation methods have been proposed,and the results have become more and more accurate.However,most of these methods are based on supervised learning,which require a large amount of labeled data as training data.To overcome this shortcoming,unsupervised and self-supervised methods have also received increasing attention.In this paper,we generate a synthetic training datasets through L-system,and utilize adversarial learning to narrow the distribution difference between the generated data and the real data to obtain the ultimate network.Our method achieves state-of-the-art(SOTA)results on X-ray angiography artery disease(XCAD)by a large margin of nearly 10.4%.

A fast method to detect blood vessel in retinal image

Due to the increasing number ot diabetic patients, the number of people affected by diabetic retinopathy isexpected to increase. Diabetic retinopathy is a complication of diabetes and the most serious frequent eye disease in the world. Large-scale retinal screening for diabetic patients is necessary to prevent visual loss and blindness. The analysis of digital retinal images, obtained by the fundus camera, is viewed as a feasible approach because retinal blood vessels have been shown to change in diameter, branching angles, or tortuosity as a result of diabetic retinopathy. The morphological change can help identify the different stages of diabetic retinopathy. In addition, the acquisition of retinal image is nonintrusive and low cost. Automatic segmentation of the retinal blood vessel is a prerequisite for this analysis.~3 This article presents a method to detect blood vessel based on sobel operators.4 Small and fast computation is the outstanding merit of this method.