A Cross-Modality Learning Approach for Vessel Segmentation in Retinal Images

作者：Li, Qiaoliang; Feng, Bowei; Xie, LinPei; Liang, Ping^*; Zhang, Huisheng; Wang, Tianfu

来源：IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2016, 35(1): 109-118.

DOI：10.1109/TMI.2015.2457891

• Cross-modality learning
• deep learning
• retinal image
• vessel segmentation

This paper presents a new supervised method for vessel segmentation in retinal images. This method remolds the task of segmentation as a problem of cross-modality data transformation from retinal image to vessel map. A wide and deep neural network with strong induction ability is proposed to model the transformation, and an efficient training strategy is presented. Instead of a single label of the center pixel, the network can output the label map of all pixels for a given image patch. Our approach outperforms reported state-of-the-art methods in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. The result of cross-training evaluation indicates its robustness to the training set. The approach needs no artificially designed feature and no preprocessing step, reducing the impact of subjective factors. The proposed method has the potential for application in image diagnosis of ophthalmologic diseases, and it may provide a new, general, high-performance computing framework for image segmentation.

• 出版日期2016-1
• 单位深圳大学