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Retinal blood vessel segmentation based on densely connected U-net. (English) Zbl 1467.92090

Summary: The segmentation of blood vessels from retinal images is an important and challenging task in medical analysis and diagnosis. This paper proposes a new architecture of the U-Net network for retinal blood vessel segmentation. Adding dense block to U-Net network makes each layer’s input come from the all previous layer’s output which improves the segmentation accuracy of small blood vessels. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated on two public datasets (DRIVE and \(\mathrm{CHASE_{DB1}})\). The obtained results (DRIVE: Acc = 0.9559, AUC = 0.9793, \(\mathrm{CHASE_{DB1}}\): Acc = 0.9488, AUC = 0.9785) demonstrate the better performance of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Also, the results show that our method achieves better results for the segmentation of small blood vessels and can be helpful to evaluate related ophthalmic diseases.

MSC:

92C50 Medical applications (general)
92B20 Neural networks for/in biological studies, artificial life and related topics

Software:

U-Net
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Full Text: DOI

References:

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