scholarly journals Joint optic disc and cup segmentation based on multi-scale feature analysis and attention pyramid architecture for glaucoma screening

Author(s):  
Guangmin Sun ◽  
Zhongxiang Zhang ◽  
Junjie Zhang ◽  
Meilong Zhu ◽  
Xiao-rong Zhu ◽  
...  

AbstractAutomatic segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) is an essential task for analysing colour fundus images. In clinical practice, accurate OD and OC segmentation assist ophthalmologists in diagnosing glaucoma. In this paper, we propose a unified convolutional neural network, named ResFPN-Net, which learns the boundary feature and the inner relation between OD and OC for automatic segmentation. The proposed ResFPN-Net is mainly composed of multi-scale feature extractor, multi-scale segmentation transition and attention pyramid architecture. The multi-scale feature extractor achieved the feature encoding of fundus images and captured the boundary representations. The multi-scale segmentation transition is employed to retain the features of different scales. Moreover, an attention pyramid architecture is proposed to learn rich representations and the mutual connection in the OD and OC. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments on two public datasets. On the Drishti-GS database, we achieved a Dice coefficient of 97.59%, 89.87%, the accuracy of 99.21%, 98.77%, and the Averaged Hausdorff distance of 0.099, 0.882 on the OD and OC segmentation, respectively. We achieved a Dice coefficient of 96.41%, 83.91%, the accuracy of 99.30%, 99.24%, and the Averaged Hausdorff distance of 0.166, 1.210 on the RIM-ONE database for OD and OC segmentation, respectively. Comprehensive results show that the proposed method outperforms other competitive OD and OC segmentation methods and appears more adaptable in cross-dataset scenarios. The introduced multi-scale loss function achieved significantly lower training loss and higher accuracy compared with other loss functions. Furthermore, the proposed method is further validated in OC to OD ratio calculation task and achieved the best MAE of 0.0499 and 0.0630 on the Drishti-GS and RIM-ONE datasets, respectively. Finally, we evaluated the effectiveness of the glaucoma screening on Drishti-GS and RIM-ONE datasets, achieving the AUC of 0.8947 and 0.7964. These results proved that the proposed ResFPN-Net is effective in analysing fundus images for glaucoma screening and can be applied in other relative biomedical image segmentation applications.

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 2650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haixing Li ◽  
Haibo Luo ◽  
Yunpeng Liu

The accurate segmentation of the paraspinal muscle in Magnetic Resonance (MR) images is a critical step in the automated analysis of lumbar diseases such as chronic low back pain, disc herniation and lumbar spinal stenosis. However, the automatic segmentation of multifidus and erector spinae has not yet been achieved due to three unusual challenges: (1) the muscle boundary is unclear; (2) the gray histogram distribution of the target overlaps with the background; (3) the intra- and inter-patient shape is variable. We propose to tackle the problem of the automatic segmentation of paravertebral muscles using a deformed U-net consisting of two main modules: the residual module and the feature pyramid attention (FPA) module. The residual module can directly return the gradient while preserving the details of the image to make the model easier to train. The FPA module fuses different scales of context information and provides useful salient features for high-level feature maps. In this paper, 120 cases were used for experiments, which were provided and labeled by the spine surgery department of Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University. The experimental results show that the model can achieve higher predictive capability. The dice coefficient of the multifidus is as high as 0.949, and the Hausdorff distance is 4.62 mm. The dice coefficient of the erector spinae is 0.913 and the Hausdorff distance is 7.89 mm. The work of this paper will contribute to the development of an automatic measurement system for paraspinal muscles, which is of great significance for the treatment of spinal diseases.


2017 ◽  
Vol Volume 11 ◽  
pp. 2017-2029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Almazroa ◽  
Weiwei Sun ◽  
Sami Alodhayb ◽  
Kaamran Raahemifar ◽  
Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (01) ◽  
pp. 1250075 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAN YANG ◽  
HU-CHUAN LU ◽  
GUO-LIANG FANG ◽  
GANG YANG

In this paper, we propose an effective framework to automatically segment hard exudates (HEs) in fundus images. Our framework is based on a coarse-to-fine strategy, as we first get a coarse result allowed of some negative samples, then eliminate the negative samples step by step. In our framework, we make the most of the multi-channel information by employing a boosted soft segmentation algorithm. Additionally, we develop a multi-scale background subtraction method to obtain the coarse segmentation result. After subtracting the optical disc (OD) region from the coarse result, the HEs are extracted by a SVM classifier. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) propose an efficient and robust framework for automatic HEs segmentation; (2) present a boosted soft segmentation algorithm to combine multi-channel information; (3) employ a double ring filter to segment and adjust the OD region. We perform our experiments on the pubic DIARETDB1 dateset, which consists of 89 fundus images. The performance of our algorithm is assessed on both lesion-based criterion and image-based criterion. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very effective and robust.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-100
Author(s):  
Lennart Bargsten ◽  
Katharina A. Riedl ◽  
Tobias Wissel ◽  
Fabian J. Brunner ◽  
Klaus Schaefers ◽  
...  

Abstract Knowing the shape of vascular calcifications is crucial for appropriate planning and conductance of percutaneous coronary interventions. The clinical workflow can therefore benefit from automatic segmentation of calcified plaques in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images. To solve segmentation problems with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), large datasets are usually required. However, datasets are often rather small in the medical domain. Hence, developing and investigating methods for increasing CNN performance on small datasets can help on the way towards clinically relevant results. We compared two state-of-the-art CNN architectures for segmentation, U-Net and DeepLabV3, and investigated how incorporating auxiliary image data with vessel wall and lumen annotations improves the calcium segmentation performance by using these either for pretraining or multi-task training. DeepLabV3 outperforms U-Net with up to 6.3 % by means of the Dice coefficient and 36.5 % by means of the average Hausdorff distance. Using auxiliary data improves the segmentation performance in both cases, whereas the multi-task approach outperforms the pre-training approach. The improvements of the multi-task approach in contrast to not using auxiliary data at all is 5.7 % for the Dice coefficient and 42.9 % for the average Hausdorff distance. Automatic segmentation of calcified plaques in IVUS images is a demanding task due to their relatively small size compared to the image dimensions and due to visual ambiguities with other image structures. We showed that this problem can generally be tackled by CNNs. Furthermore, we were able to improve the performance by a multi-task learning approach with auxiliary segmentation data.


Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 811
Author(s):  
Dan Yang ◽  
Guoru Liu ◽  
Mengcheng Ren ◽  
Bin Xu ◽  
Jiao Wang

Computer-aided automatic segmentation of retinal blood vessels plays an important role in the diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale feature fusion retinal vessel segmentation model based on U-Net, named MSFFU-Net. The model introduces the inception structure into the multi-scale feature extraction encoder part, and the max-pooling index is applied during the upsampling process in the feature fusion decoder of an improved network. The skip layer connection is used to transfer each set of feature maps generated on the encoder path to the corresponding feature maps on the decoder path. Moreover, a cost-sensitive loss function based on the Dice coefficient and cross-entropy is designed. Four transformations—rotating, mirroring, shifting and cropping—are used as data augmentation strategies, and the CLAHE algorithm is applied to image preprocessing. The proposed framework is tested and trained on DRIVE and STARE, and sensitivity (Sen), specificity (Spe), accuracy (Acc), and area under curve (AUC) are adopted as the evaluation metrics. Detailed comparisons with U-Net model, at last, it verifies the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model. The Sen of 0.7762 and 0.7721, Spe of 0.9835 and 0.9885, Acc of 0.9694 and 0.9537 and AUC value of 0.9790 and 0.9680 were achieved on DRIVE and STARE databases, respectively. Results are also compared to other state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of other methods and showing its competitive results.


Author(s):  
Rongchang Zhao ◽  
Wangmin Liao ◽  
Beiji Zou ◽  
Zailiang Chen ◽  
Shuo Li

Evidence identification, optic disc segmentation and automated glaucoma diagnosis are the most clinically significant tasks for clinicians to assess fundus images. However, delivering the three tasks simultaneously is extremely challenging due to the high variability of fundus structure and lack of datasets with complete annotations. In this paper, we propose an innovative Weakly-Supervised Multi-Task Learning method (WSMTL) for accurate evidence identification, optic disc segmentation and automated glaucoma diagnosis. The WSMTL method only uses weak-label data with binary diagnostic labels (normal/glaucoma) for training, while obtains pixel-level segmentation mask and diagnosis for testing. The WSMTL is constituted by a skip and densely connected CNN to capture multi-scale discriminative representation of fundus structure; a well-designed pyramid integration structure to generate high-resolution evidence map for evidence identification, in which the pixels with higher value represent higher confidence to highlight the abnormalities; a constrained clustering branch for optic disc segmentation; and a fully-connected discriminator for automated glaucoma diagnosis. Experimental results show that our proposed WSMTL effectively and simultaneously delivers evidence identification, optic disc segmentation (89.6% TP Dice), and accurate glaucoma diagnosis (92.4% AUC). This endows our WSMTL a great potential for the effective clinical assessment of glaucoma.


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