The retinal vessels in the human body are the only ones that can be observed directly by non-invasive imaging techniques. Retinal vessel morphology and structure are the important objects of concern for physicians in the early diagnosis and treatment of related diseases. The classification of retinal vessels has important guiding significance in the basic stage of diagnostic treatment. This paper proposes a novel method based on generative adversarial networks with improved U-Net, which can achieve synchronous automatic segmentation and classification of blood vessels by an end-to-end network. The proposed method avoids the dependency of the segmentation results in the multiple classification tasks. Moreover, the proposed method builds on an accurate classification of arteries and veins while also classifying arteriovenous crossings. The validity of the proposed method is evaluated on the RITE dataset: the accuracy of image comprehensive classification reaches 96.87%. The sensitivity and specificity of arteriovenous classification reach 91.78% and 97.25%. The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and show the competitive classification performance.
Keywords: GAN; U-Net; fundus image; image segmentation; retinal vessel classification.