Adaptive feature fusion cascade Transformer retinal vessel segmentation algorithm

Liang Liming; Lu Baohe; Long Pengwei; Yang Yuan

doi:10.12086/oee.2023.230161

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Liang L M, Lu B H, Long P W, et al. Adaptive feature fusion cascade Transformer retinal vessel segmentation algorithm[J]. Opto-Electron Eng, 2023, 50(10): 230161. doi: 10.12086/oee.2023.230161

Citation:

Liang L M, Lu B H, Long P W, et al. Adaptive feature fusion cascade Transformer retinal vessel segmentation algorithm[J]. Opto-Electron Eng, 2023, 50(10): 230161. doi: 10.12086/oee.2023.230161

Adaptive feature fusion cascade Transformer retinal vessel segmentation algorithm

School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou, Jiangxi 341000, China

Fund Project: Project supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51365017, 6146301), and Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (20192BAB205084)

More Information

^*Corresponding author: 939175848@qq.com

Received Date 03 July 2023

Revised Date 28 September 2023

Accepted Date 07 October 2023

Published Date 25 October 2023

Abstract

Abstract

An adaptive feature fusion cascaded Transformer retinal vessel segmentation algorithm is proposed in this paper to address issues such as pathological artifacts interference, incomplete segmentation of small vessels, and low contrast between vascular foreground and non-vascular background. Firstly, image preprocessing is performed through contrast-limited histogram equalization and Gamma correction to enhance vascular texture features. Secondly, an adaptive enhancing attention module is designed in the encoding part to reduce computational redundancy while eliminating noise in retinal background images. Furthermore, a cascaded ensemble Transformer module is introduced at the bottom of the encoding-decoding structure to establish dependencies between long and short-distance vascular features. Lastly, a gate-controlled feature fusion module is introduced in the decoding part to achieve semantic fusion between encoding and decoding, enhancing the smoothness of retinal vessel segmentation. Validation on public datasets DRIVE, CHASE_DB1, and STARE yielded accuracy rates of 97.09%, 97.60%, and 97.57%, sensitivity rates of 80.38%, 81.05%, and 80.32%, and specificity rates of 98.69%, 98.71%, and 98.99%, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the overall performance of this algorithm surpasses that of most existing state-of-the-art methods and holds potential value in the diagnosis of clinical ophthalmic diseases.
- retinal vessel segmentation /
- Transformer /
- adaptive enhancement of attention /
- gating feature fusion

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References

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Overview

Overview

Retinal blood vessel images contain rich geometric structures, such as vessel diameter, branching angle, and length, which allow ophthalmologists to prevent and diagnose diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerosis by observing information about retinal blood vessel structure. However, the topology of the fundus blood vessels is intricate and difficult to extract medically, so it is important to study a retinal vessel segmentation algorithm that can be efficient and automatic for clinicopathologic diagnosis. The contemporary retinal vessel segmentation methods are mainly categorized into traditional machine- and deep-learning-based methods. Traditional machine learning methods include morphology-based processing, matched filter-based, and wavelet transform, etc. Such methods usually do not require a priori labeling information, but rather utilize the similarity between the data for analysis. The deep learning method is an end-to-end learning method, that can automatically extract the bottom and high-level feature information of the image, compared with the traditional segmentation methods to avoid the process of manual feature extraction, and at the same time reduce the subjectivity of segmentation, and its generalization ability is significantly better than that of the traditional methods. However, the fundus retinal segmentation task still suffers from pathologic artifact interference, incomplete segmentation of tiny vessels, and low contrast between the vascular foreground and the nonvascular background. To solve the above problems, an adaptive feature fusion cascade Transformer retinal vessel segmentation algorithm is proposed. The original image of the retina dataset was first subjected to dataset expansion to ensure adequate training and prediction of the model, and operations such as gamma correction were performed to perform dataset image enhancement and to improve the contrast of the blood vessel texture. Secondly, the adaptive enhancement attention module is designed in the encoding part to improve the information interaction ability between different channels, and at the same time, the background noise information of the image is eliminated to reduce the interference of pathological artifacts and enhance the nonlinear ability of the vascular image. Then the cascade group Transformer module is added at the bottom end of the codec to effectively aggregate the contextual vascular feature information and fully capture the local features of tiny blood vessels. Finally, a gated feature fusion module is introduced in the decoding part to capture the spatial feature information of different sizes in the codec layer, which improves the feature utilization and algorithm robustness. Validated on the public datasets DRIVE, CHASE_DB1, and STARE, the accuracy reaches 97.09%, 97.60%, and 97.57%, the sensitivity reaches 80.38%, 81.05%, and 80.32%, and the specificity reaches 98.69%, 98.71%, and 98.99%. The experimental results show that the overall performance of the algorithm in this paper is better than most of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms, and it has a certain application value for the diagnosis of clinical ophthalmic diseases.