Developing a Novel Methodology by Integrating Deep Learning and HMM for Segmentation of Retinal Blood Vessels in Fundus Images

Abstract

Accurate segregation of retinal blood vessels network plays a crucial role in clinical assessments, treatments, and rehabilitation process. Owing to the presence of acquisition and instrumentation anomalies, precise tracking of vessels network is challenging. For this, a new fundus image segmentation framework is proposed by combining deep neural networks, and hidden Markov model. It has three main modules: the Atrous spatial pyramid pooling-based encoder, the decoder, and hidden Markov model vessel tracker. The encoder utilized modified ResNet18 deep neural networks model for low-and-high-levels features extraction. These features are concatenated in module-II by the decoder to perform convolution operations to obtain the initial segmentation. Previous modules detected the main vessel structure and overlooked some small capillaries. For improved segmentation, hidden Markov model vessel tracker is integrated with module-I and-II to detect overlooked small capillaries of the vessels network. In last module, final segmentation is obtained by combining multi-oriented sub-images using logical OR operation. This novel framework is validated experimentally using two standard DRIVE and STARE datasets. The developed model offers high average values of accuracy, area under the curve, and sensitivity of 99.8, 99.0, and 98.2%, respectively. Analysis of the results revealed that the developed approach offered enhanced performance in terms of sensitivity 18%, accuracy 3%, and specificity 1% over the state-of-the-art approaches. Owing to better learning and generalization capability, the developed approach tracked blood vessels network efficiently and automatically compared to other approaches. The proposed approach can be helpful for human eye assessment, disease diagnosis, and rehabilitation process.

Keywords: Deep neural networks; Fundus vessels; HMM; ResNet; Transfer learning.