Feature preserving mesh network for semantic segmentation of retinal vasculature to support ophthalmic disease analysis

Abstract

Introduction: Ophthalmic diseases are approaching an alarming count across the globe. Typically, ophthalmologists depend on manual methods for the analysis of different ophthalmic diseases such as glaucoma, Sickle cell retinopathy (SCR), diabetic retinopathy, and hypertensive retinopathy. All these manual assessments are not reliable, time-consuming, tedious, and prone to error. Therefore, automatic methods are desirable to replace conventional approaches. The accuracy of this segmentation of these vessels using automated approaches directly depends on the quality of fundus images. Retinal vessels are assumed as a potential biomarker for the diagnosis of many ophthalmic diseases. Mostly newly developed ophthalmic diseases contain minor changes in vasculature which is a critical job for the early detection and analysis of disease.

Method: Several artificial intelligence-based methods suggested intelligent solutions for automated retinal vessel detection. However, existing methods exhibited significant limitations in segmentation performance, complexity, and computational efficiency. Specifically, most of the existing methods failed in detecting small vessels owing to vanishing gradient problems. To overcome the stated problems, an intelligence-based automated shallow network with high performance and low cost is designed named Feature Preserving Mesh Network (FPM-Net) for the accurate segmentation of retinal vessels. FPM-Net employs a feature-preserving block that preserves the spatial features and helps in maintaining a better segmentation performance. Similarly, FPM-Net architecture uses a series of feature concatenation that also boosts the overall segmentation performance. Finally, preserved features, low-level input image information, and up-sampled spatial features are aggregated at the final concatenation stage for improved pixel prediction accuracy. The technique is reliable since it performs better on the DRIVE database, CHASE-DB1 database, and STARE dataset.

Results and discussion: Experimental outcomes confirm that FPM-Net outperforms state-of-the-art techniques with superior computational efficiency. In addition, presented results are achieved without using any preprocessing or postprocessing scheme. Our proposed method FPM-Net gives improvement results which can be observed with DRIVE datasets, it gives Se, Sp, and Acc as 0.8285, 0.98270, 0.92920, for CHASE-DB1 dataset 0.8219, 0.9840, 0.9728 and STARE datasets it produces 0.8618, 0.9819 and 0.9727 respectively. Which is a remarkable difference and enhancement as compared to the conventional methods using only 2.45 million trainable parameters.

Keywords: computer–aided diagnosis; ophthalmic diseases; retinal image segmentation; retinal vasculature; semantic segmentation.