scholarly journals Automatic Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based on an Improved U-Net Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Zihe Huang ◽  
Ying Fang ◽  
He Huang ◽  
Xiaomei Xu ◽  
Jiwei Wang ◽  
...  

Retinal blood vessels are the only deep microvessels in the blood circulation system that can be observed directly and noninvasively, providing us with a means of observing vascular pathologies. Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, such as glaucoma and diabetes, can cause structural changes in the retinal microvascular network. Therefore, the study of effective retinal vessel segmentation methods is of great significance for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases and the vascular network’s quantitative results. This paper proposes an automatic retinal vessel segmentation method based on an improved U-Net network. Firstly, the image patches are rotated to amplify the image data, and then, the RGB fundus image is preprocessed by normalization. Secondly, after the improved U-Net model is constructed with 23 convolutional layers, 4 pooling layers, 4 upsampling layers, 2 dropout layers, and Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block, the extracted image patches are utilized for training the model. Finally, the fundus images are segmented through the trained model to achieve precise extraction of retinal blood vessels. According to experimental results, the accuracy of 0.9701, 0.9683, and 0.9698, sensitivity of 0.8011, 0.6329, and 0.7478, specificity of 0.9849, 0.9967, and 0.9895, F1-Score of 0.8099, 0.8049, and 0.8013, and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.8895, 0.8845, and 0.8686 were achieved on DRIVE, STARE, and HRF databases, respectively, which is better than most classical algorithms.

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (18) ◽  
pp. 2297
Author(s):  
Toufique A. Soomro ◽  
Ahmed Ali ◽  
Nisar Ahmed Jandan ◽  
Ahmed J. Afifi ◽  
Muhammad Irfan ◽  
...  

Segmentation of retinal vessels plays a crucial role in detecting many eye diseases, and its reliable computerized implementation is becoming essential for automated retinal disease screening systems. A large number of retinal vessel segmentation algorithms are available, but these methods improve accuracy levels. Their sensitivity remains low due to the lack of proper segmentation of low contrast vessels, and this low contrast requires more attention in this segmentation process. In this paper, we have proposed new preprocessing steps for the precise extraction of retinal blood vessels. These proposed preprocessing steps are also tested on other existing algorithms to observe their impact. There are two steps to our suggested module for segmenting retinal blood vessels. The first step involves implementing and validating the preprocessing module. The second step applies these preprocessing stages to our proposed binarization steps to extract retinal blood vessels. The proposed preprocessing phase uses the traditional image-processing method to provide a much-improved segmented vessel image. Our binarization steps contained the image coherence technique for the retinal blood vessels. The proposed method gives good performance on a database accessible to the public named DRIVE and STARE. The novelty of this proposed method is that it is an unsupervised method and offers an accuracy of around 96% and sensitivity of 81% while outperforming existing approaches. Due to new tactics at each step of the proposed process, this blood vessel segmentation application is suitable for computer analysis of retinal images, such as automated screening for the early diagnosis of eye disease.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2070 (1) ◽  
pp. 012104
Author(s):  
Sushma Nagdeote ◽  
Sapna Prabhu

Abstract This paper deals with the new segmentation techniques for retinal blood vessels on fundus images. This technique aims at extracting thin vessels to reduce the intensity difference between thick and thin vessels. This paper proposes the modified UNet model by incorporating ResNet blocks into it which includes structured prediction. In this work we generate the visualization of blood vessels from retinal fundus image for two loss functions namely cross entropy loss and Dice loss where the network classifies several pixels simultaneously. The results shows higher accuracy by considering a much more expressive UNet algorithm and outperforms the past algorithms for Retinal Vessel Segmentation. The benefits of this approach will be demonstrated empirically.


Author(s):  
Chandana R

Glaucoma, a disease of the optic nerve is caused by the increase in the intraocular pressure of the eye and results in damage to the optic nerve and vision loss. The main characteristic of glaucoma is an elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) and also the blood vessels get narrower. Vessel segmentation is one of the main steps in retinal automated analysis tools. Retinal vessel segmentation and delineation of morphological attributes of retinal blood vessels are utilized for diagnosis, screening, treatment, and evaluation of various cardiovascular and ophthalmologic diseases. Since, the numbers of blood vessels are more in the glaucomatous eye , glaucoma is detected by means of ISNT ratio. The image processing operations are performed on glaucomatous and normal eyes. We have chosen ten images of each from the database and ISNT ratio is calculated to get the area of blood vessels in each of the four quadrants of the eye and hence glaucoma is detected.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. e0257013
Author(s):  
Xiaolong Hu ◽  
Liejun Wang ◽  
Shuli Cheng ◽  
Yongming Li

The cardinal symptoms of some ophthalmic diseases observed through exceptional retinal blood vessels, such as retinal vein occlusion, diabetic retinopathy, etc. The advanced deep learning models used to obtain morphological and structural information of blood vessels automatically are conducive to the early treatment and initiative prevention of ophthalmic diseases. In our work, we propose a hierarchical dilation convolutional network (HDC-Net) to extract retinal vessels in a pixel-to-pixel manner. It utilizes the hierarchical dilation convolution (HDC) module to capture the fragile retinal blood vessels usually neglected by other methods. An improved residual dual efficient channel attention (RDECA) module can infer more delicate channel information to reinforce the discriminative capability of the model. The structured Dropblock can help our HDC-Net model to solve the network overfitting effectively. From a holistic perspective, the segmentation results obtained by HDC-Net are superior to other deep learning methods on three acknowledged datasets (DRIVE, CHASE-DB1, STARE), the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, f1-score and AUC score are {0.8252, 0.9829, 0.9692, 0.8239, 0.9871}, {0.8227, 0.9853, 0.9745, 0.8113, 0.9884}, and {0.8369, 0.9866, 0.9751, 0.8385, 0.9913}, respectively. It surpasses most other advanced retinal vessel segmentation models. Qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrates that HDC-Net can fulfill the task of retinal vessel segmentation efficiently and accurately.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Yuliang Ma ◽  
Xue Li ◽  
Xiaopeng Duan ◽  
Yun Peng ◽  
Yingchun Zhang

Purpose. Retinal blood vessel image segmentation is an important step in ophthalmological analysis. However, it is difficult to segment small vessels accurately because of low contrast and complex feature information of blood vessels. The objective of this study is to develop an improved retinal blood vessel segmentation structure (WA-Net) to overcome these challenges. Methods. This paper mainly focuses on the width of deep learning. The channels of the ResNet block were broadened to propagate more low-level features, and the identity mapping pathway was slimmed to maintain parameter complexity. A residual atrous spatial pyramid module was used to capture the retinal vessels at various scales. We applied weight normalization to eliminate the impacts of the mini-batch and improve segmentation accuracy. The experiments were performed on the DRIVE and STARE datasets. To show the generalizability of WA-Net, we performed cross-training between datasets. Results. The global accuracy and specificity within datasets were 95.66% and 96.45% and 98.13% and 98.71%, respectively. The accuracy and area under the curve of the interdataset diverged only by 1%∼2% compared with the performance of the corresponding intradataset. Conclusion. All the results show that WA-Net extracts more detailed blood vessels and shows superior performance on retinal blood vessel segmentation tasks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 403
Author(s):  
Lin Pan ◽  
Zhen Zhang ◽  
Shaohua Zheng ◽  
Liqin Huang

Automatic segmentation and centerline extraction of blood vessels from retinal fundus images is an essential step to measure the state of retinal blood vessels and achieve the goal of auxiliary diagnosis. Combining the information of blood vessel segments and centerline can help improve the continuity of results and performance. However, previous studies have usually treated these two tasks as separate research topics. Therefore, we propose a novel multitask learning network (MSC-Net) for retinal vessel segmentation and centerline extraction. The network uses a multibranch design to combine information between two tasks. Channel and atrous spatial fusion block (CAS-FB) is designed to fuse and correct the features of different branches and different scales. The clDice loss function is also used to constrain the topological continuity of blood vessel segments and centerline. Experimental results on different fundus blood vessel datasets (DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE) show that our method can obtain better segmentation and centerline extraction results at different scales and has better topological continuity than state-of-the-art methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yun Jiang ◽  
Falin Wang ◽  
Jing Gao ◽  
Wenhuan Liu

Retinal vessel segmentation has high value for the research on the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, hypertension, and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Most methods based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) do not have large receptive fields or rich spatial information and cannot capture global context information of the larger areas. Therefore, it is difficult to identify the lesion area, and the segmentation efficiency is poor. This paper presents a butterfly fully convolutional neural network (BFCN). First, in view of the low contrast between blood vessels and the background in retinal blood vessel images, this paper uses automatic color enhancement (ACE) technology to increase the contrast between blood vessels and the background. Second, using the multiscale information extraction (MSIE) module in the backbone network can capture the global contextual information in a larger area to reduce the loss of feature information. At the same time, using the transfer layer (T_Layer) can not only alleviate gradient vanishing problem and repair the information loss in the downsampling process but also obtain rich spatial information. Finally, for the first time in the paper, the segmentation image is postprocessed, and the Laplacian sharpening method is used to improve the accuracy of vessel segmentation. The method mentioned in this paper has been verified by the DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE datasets, with the accuracy of 0.9627, 0.9735, and 0.9688, respectively.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-24
Author(s):  
Vita Nurdinawati ◽  
Atika Hendryani ◽  
Thareq Barasabha

Retinal vessel segmentation is part of the morphological extraction of retinal blood vessels that plays an essential role in medical image processing. Manual segmentation is possible to do, but it is time-consuming and requires special operators. Moreover, the possibility of variability between operators is vast. This study aims to answer the shortcomings of the manual segmentation process by automatically segmenting retinal blood vessels. The main contribution of this study is the use of a simple method to iteratively segment retinal blood vessels.  All processes in the segmentation are simulated using Matlab. The algorithm was evaluated by comparing the results of the automatic segmentation with 20 manually segmented images from the STARE dataset. The result show specificity 98.13%, accuracy 93.60%, sensitivity 56.42%, precision 80.48%, and the dice coefficient 64.06%. In conclusion, the automatic retinal blood vessel image segmentation process worked well.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Kromm ◽  
K. Rohr

ABSTRACTAutomatic segmentation and centerline extraction of retinal blood vessels from fundus image data is crucial for early detection of retinal diseases. We have developed a novel deep learning method for segmentation and centerline extraction of retinal blood vessels which is based on the Capsule network in combination with the Inception architecture. Compared to state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks, our method has much fewer parameters due to its shallow architecture and generalizes well without using data augmentation. We performed a quantitative evaluation using the DRIVE dataset for both vessel segmentation and centerline extraction. Our method achieved state-of-the-art performance for vessel segmentation and outperformed existing methods for centerline extraction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Santosh S. Chowhan ◽  
Rakesh S. Deore ◽  
Sachin A. Naik

Diabetic retinopathy is a disease in diabetic patients that affects the eye. It happens due to damage in the blood vessels of the light-sensitive tissues at the retina. In non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy, tiny changes occur in the blood vessels of the eye. Non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy can trigger macular edema or macular ischemia. In this study proposes the retinal vessel segmentation and vessel quantization on the DRIVE database which is publicly available. The experimental results express the retinal vessel can be effectively detected and segmented.


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