Prompt Deep Light-Weight Vessel Segmentation Network (PLVS-Net)

IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. 2023 Mar-Apr;20(2):1363-1371. doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2022.3211936. Epub 2023 Apr 3.

Abstract

Achieving accurate retinal vessel segmentation is critical in the progression and diagnosis of vision-threatening diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. Existing vessel segmentation methods are based on encoder-decoder architectures, which frequently fail to take into account the retinal vessel structure's context in their analysis. As a result, such methods have difficulty bridging the semantic gap between encoder and decoder characteristics. This paper proposes a Prompt Deep Light-weight Vessel Segmentation Network (PLVS-Net) to address these issues by using prompt blocks. Each prompt block use combination of asymmetric kernel convolutions, depth-wise separable convolutions, and ordinary convolutions to extract useful features. This novel strategy improves the performance of the segmentation network while simultaneously decreasing the number of trainable parameters. Our method outperformed competing approaches in the literature on three benchmark datasets, including DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE.

MeSH terms

  • Benchmarking*
  • Humans
  • Macular Degeneration* / diagnostic imaging
  • Retinal Vessels / diagnostic imaging
  • Semantics