Gabor-net with multi-scale hierarchical fusion of features for fundus retinal blood vessel segmentation

• Published in: Biocybernetics and biomedical engineering 2024-04, Vol.44 (2), p.402-413
• Main Authors: Fang, Tao, Cai, Zhefei, Fan, Yingle
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological vision; Blood vessel segmentation; Gabor function; Multi-scale; Non-subsampling
• ISSN: 0208-5216
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bbe.2024.05.004

This paper proposes a fundus retinal blood vessel segmentation model based on a deep convolutional network structure and biological visual feature extraction mechanism. It aims to solve the multi-scale problem of blood vessels in the fundus retinal blood vessel segmentation task in the field of medical image processing on the basis of increasing the biological interpretability of the model. First, the subject feature information of the retinal blood vessel image is obtained by using the non-subsampled Residual Bolck convolution main channel. Secondly, combined with the study of biological vision mechanisms, an information processing model of the Retina-Exogenius-Primary visual cortex (V1) ventral visual pathway was established. Gabor functions of different scales are used to simulate the structure of different levels of the visual pathway, and the scale information at different levels is integrated into the corresponding hierarchical stages of the convolutional main pathway network to enrich the information of small blood vessels and enhance the semantic information of the overall blood vessels. Finally, considering the imbalance of the ratio of vessel and nonvessel pixels, an adaptive optimization scheme using hybrid loss function weights is proposed to enhance the priority of blood vessel pixels in the calculation of the loss function. According to the experimental results on the STARE, DRIVE and CHASE_DB1 data sets, the model still achieves superior performance evaluation indicators overall compared with the existing optimal methods in the fundus retinal blood vessel segmentation task. This research is of great significance to the field of medical image processing and can provide more accurate auxiliary diagnostic information for clinical diagnosis and treatment.