Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Adversarial Learning and Iterative Refinement

Retinal vessel segmentation is a challenging medical task owing to small size of dataset, micro blood vessels and low image contrast. To address these issues, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network in this paper, which takes the advantage of both adversarial learning and recurrent neural network. An iterative design of network with recurrent unit is performed to refine the segmentation results from input retinal image gradually. Recurrent unit preserves high-level semantic information for feature reuse, so as to output a sufficiently refined segmentation map instead of a coarse mask. Moreover, an adversarial loss is imposing the integrity and connectivity constraints on the segmented vessel regions, thus greatly reducing topology errors of segmentation. The experimental results on the DRIVE dataset show that our method achieves area under curve and sensitivity of 98.17% and 80.64%, respectively. Our method achieves superior performance in retinal vessel segmentation compared with other existing state-of-the-art methods. © 2022, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.