Segmenting the retinal vasculature entails a trade-off between how much of the overall vascular structure we identify vs. how precisely we segment individual vessels. In particular, state-of-the-art methods tend to under-segment faint vessels, as well as pixels that lie on the edges of thicker vessels. Thus, they underestimate the width of individual vessels, as well as the ratio of large to small vessels. More generally, many crucial bio-markers---including the artery-vein (AV) ratio, branching angles, number of bifurcation, fractal dimension, tortuosity, vascular length-to-diameter ratio and wall-to-lumen length---require precise measurements of individual vessels. To address this limitation, we propose a novel, stochastic training scheme for deep neural networks that better classifies the faint, ambiguous regions of the image. Our approach relies on two key innovations. First, we train our deep networks with dynamic weights that fluctuate during each training iteration. This stochastic approach forces the network to learn a mapping that robustly balances precision and recall. Second, we decouple the segmentation process into two steps. In the first half of our pipeline, we estimate the likelihood of every pixel and then use these likelihoods to segment pixels that are clearly vessel or background. In the latter part of our pipeline, we use a second network to classify the ambiguous regions in the image. Our proposed method obtained state-of-the-art results on five retinal datasets---DRIVE, STARE, CHASE-DB, AV-WIDE, and VEVIO---by learning a robust balance between false positive and false negative rates. In addition, we are the first to report segmentation results on the AV-WIDE dataset, and we have made the ground-truth annotations for this dataset publicly available.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net). The segmentation of retinal vessels is of significance for doctors to diagnose the fundus diseases. However, existing methods have various problems in the segmentation of the retinal vessels, such as insufficient segmentation of retinal vessels, weak anti-noise interference ability, and sensitivity to lesions, etc. Aiming to the shortcomings of existed methods, this paper proposes the use of conditional deep convolutional generative adversarial networks to segment the retinal vessels. We mainly improve the network structure of the generator. The introduction of the residual module at the convolutional layer for residual learning makes the network structure sensitive to changes in the output, as to better adjust the weight of the generator. In order to reduce the number of parameters and calculations, using a small convolution to halve the number of channels in the input signature before using a large convolution kernel. By used skip connection to connect the output of the convolutional layer with the output of the deconvolution layer to avoid low-level information sharing. By verifying the method on the DRIVE and STARE datasets, the segmentation accuracy rate is 96.08 and 97.71 , the sensitivity reaches 82.74 and 85.34 respectively, and the F-measure reaches 82.08 and 85.02 respectively. The sensitivity is 4.82 and 2.4 higher than that of R2U-Net. Abstract Automatic segmentation of retinal vessels in fundus images plays an important role in the diagnosis of some diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. In this paper, we propose Deformable U-Net (DUNet), which exploits the retinal vessels’ local features with a U-shape architecture, in an end to end manner for retinal vessel segmentation. Inspired by the recently introduced deformable convolutional networks, we integrate the deformable convolution into the proposed network. The DUNet, with upsampling operators to increase the output resolution, is designed to extract context information and enable precise localization by combining low-level features with high-level ones. Furthermore, DUNet captures the retinal vessels at various shapes and scales by adaptively adjusting the receptive fields according to vessels’ scales and shapes. Public datasets: DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1 and HRF are used to test our models. Detailed comparisons between the proposed network and the deformable neural network, U-Net are provided in our study. Results show that more detailed vessels can be extracted by DUNet and it exhibits state-of-the-art performance for retinal vessel segmentation with a global accuracy of 0.9566 0.9641 0.9610 0.9651 and AUC of 0.9802 0.9832 0.9804 0.9831 on DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1 and HRF respectively. Moreover, to show the generalization ability of the DUNet, we use another two retinal vessel data sets, i.e., WIDE and SYNTHE, to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze and compare with other methods. Extensive cross-training evaluations are used to further assess the extendibility of DUNet. The proposed method has the potential to be applied to the early diagnosis of diseases. U-Net has been providing state-of-the-art performance in many medical image segmentation problems. Many modifications have been proposed for U-Net, such as attention U-Net, recurrent residual convolutional U-Net (R2-UNet), and U-Net with residual blocks or blocks with dense connections. However, all these modifications have an encoder-decoder structure with skip connections, and the number of paths for information flow is limited. We propose LadderNet in this paper, which can be viewed as a chain of multiple U-Nets. Instead of only one pair of encoder branch and decoder branch in U-Net, a LadderNet has multiple pairs of encoder-decoder branches, and has skip connections between every pair of adjacent decoder and decoder branches in each level. Inspired by the success of ResNet and R2-UNet, we use modified residual blocks where two convolutional layers in one block share the same weights. A LadderNet has more paths for information flow because of skip connections and residual blocks, and can be viewed as an ensemble of Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN). The equivalence to an ensemble of FCNs improves segmentation accuracy, while the shared weights within each residual block reduce parameter number. Semantic segmentation is essential for retinal disease detection. We tested LadderNet on two benchmark datasets for blood vessel segmentation in retinal images, and achieved superior performance over methods in the literature. The implementation is provided https: github.com juntang-zhuang LadderNet