Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based on Self-Attention Feature Selection

Abstract

Many major diseases can cause changes in the morphology of blood vessels, and the segmentation of retinal blood vessels is of great significance for preventing these diseases. Obtaining complete, continuous, and high-resolution segmentation results is very challenging due to the diverse structures of retinal tissues, the complex spatial structures of blood vessels, and the presence of many small ships. In recent years, deep learning networks like UNet have been widely used in medical image processing. However, the continuous down-sampling operations in UNet can result in the loss of a significant amount of information. Although skip connections between the encoder and decoder can help address this issue, the encoder features still contain a large amount of irrelevant information that cannot be efficiently utilized by the decoder. To alleviate the irrelevant information, this paper proposes a feature selection module between the decoder and encoder that utilizes the self-attention mechanism of transformers to accurately and efficiently select the relevant encoder features for the decoder. Additionally, a lightweight Residual Global Context module is proposed to obtain dense global contextual information and establish dependencies between pixels, which can effectively preserve vascular details and segment small vessels accurately and continuously. Experimental results on three publicly available color fundus image datasets (DRIVE, CHASE, and STARE) demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in terms of both performance metrics and visual quality.