Deep learning based retinal vessel segmentation and hypertensive retinopathy quantification using heterogeneous features cross-attention neural network

• Published in: Frontiers in medicine 2024-05, Vol.11, p.1377479-1377479
• Main Authors: Liu, Xinghui, Tan, Hongwen, Wang, Wu, Chen, Zhangrong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: color fundus images; cross-attention network; deep learning; hypertensive retinopathy quantification; Medicine; retinal vessel segmentation
• ISSN: 2296-858X; 2296-858X
• DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2024.1377479

Retinal vessels play a pivotal role as biomarkers in the detection of retinal diseases, including hypertensive retinopathy. The manual identification of these retinal vessels is both resource-intensive and time-consuming. The fidelity of vessel segmentation in automated methods directly depends on the fundus images' quality. In instances of sub-optimal image quality, applying deep learning-based methodologies emerges as a more effective approach for precise segmentation. We propose a heterogeneous neural network combining the benefit of local semantic information extraction of convolutional neural network and long-range spatial features mining of transformer network structures. Such cross-attention network structure boosts the model's ability to tackle vessel structures in the retinal images. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance on vessel segmentation and the big potential of hypertensive retinopathy quantification.