Atrous residual convolutional neural network based on U-Net for retinal vessel segmentation

PLoS One. 2022 Aug 22;17(8):e0273318. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273318. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Extracting features of retinal vessels from fundus images plays an essential role in computer-aided diagnosis of diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and cerebrovascular diseases. Although a number of deep learning-based methods have been used in this field, the accuracy of retinal vessel segmentation remains challenging due to limited densely annotated data, inter-vessel differences, and structured prediction problems, especially in areas of small blood vessels and the optic disk. In this paper, we propose an ARN model with a atrous block to address these issues, which can avoid the loss of data structure, and enlarge the receptive field, so that each convolution output contains a larger range of information. In addition, we also introduce residual convolution network to increase the network depth and improve the network performance.Some key parameters are used to measure the feasibility of the model, such as sensitivity (Se), specificity (Sp), F1-score (F1), accuracy (Acc), and area under each curve (AUC). Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, which accuracy are 0.9686 on the DRIVE and 0.9746 on the CHASE DB1. The segmentation structure can assist the doctor in diagnosis more effectively.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Disease Progression
  • Fundus Oculi
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Retinal Vessels / diagnostic imaging

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.