The morphological properties of retinal vessels are closely related to the diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases. However, many problems in retinal images, such as complicated directions of vessels and difficult recognition of capillaries, bring challenges to the accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels. Thus, we propose a new retinal blood vessel segmentation method based on a dual-channel asymmetric convolutional neural network (CNN). First, we construct the thick and thin vessel extraction module based on the morphological differences in retinal vessels. A two-dimensional (2D) Gabor filter is used to perceive the scale characteristics of blood vessels after selecting the direction of blood vessels; thereby, adaptively extracting the thick vessel features characterizing the overall characteristics and the thin vessel features preserving the capillaries from fundus images. Then, considering that the single-channel network is unsuitable for the unified characterization of thick and thin vessels, we develop a dual-channel asymmetric CNN based on the U-Net model. The MainSegment-Net uses the step-by-step connection mode to achieve rapid positioning and segmentation of thick vessels; the FineSegment-Net combines dilated convolution and the skip connection to achieve the fine extraction of thin vessels. Finally, the output of the dual-channel asymmetric CNN is fused and coded to combine the segmentation results of thick and thin vessels. The performance of our method is evaluated and tested by DRIVE and CHASE_DB1. The results show that the accuracy (Acc), sensitivity (SE), and specificity (SP) of our method on the DRIVE database are 0.9630, 0.8745, and 0.9823, respectively. The evaluation indexes Acc, SE, and SP of the CHASE_DB1 database are 0.9694, 0.8916, and 0.9794, respectively. Additionally, our method combines the biological vision mechanism with deep learning to achieve rapid and automatic segmentation of retinal vessels, providing a new idea for diagnosing and analyzing subsequent medical images.
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There is a close correlation between retinal vascular status and physical diseases such as eye lesions. Retinal fundus images are an important basis for diagnosing diseases such as diabetes, glaucoma, hypertension, coronary heart disease, etc. Because the thickness of the retinal blood vessels is different, the minimum diameter is only one or two pixels wide, so obtaining accurate measurement results becomes critical and challenging. In this paper, we propose a new method of retinal blood vessel segmentation that is based on a multi-path convolutional neural network, which can be used for computer-based clinical medical image analysis. First, a low-frequency image characterizing the overall characteristics of the retinal blood vessel image and a high-frequency image characterizing the local detailed features are respectively obtained by using a Gaussian low-pass filter and a Gaussian high-pass filter. Then a feature extraction path is constructed for the characteristics of the low- and high-frequency images, respectively. Finally, according to the response results of the low-frequency feature extraction path and the high-frequency feature extraction path, the whole blood vessel perception and local feature information fusion coding are realized, and the final blood vessel segmentation map is obtained. The performance of this method is evaluated and tested by DRIVE and CHASE_DB1. In the experimental results of the DRIVE database, the evaluation indexes accuracy (Acc), sensitivity (SE), and specificity (SP) are 0.9580, 0.8639, and 0.9665, respectively, and the evaluation indexes Acc, SE, and SP of the CHASE_DB1 database are 0.9601, 0.8778, and 0.9680, respectively. In addition, the method proposed in this paper could effectively suppress noise, ensure continuity after blood vessel segmentation, and provide a feasible new idea for intelligent visual perception of medical images.
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