Architecture and Factor Design of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The retinal vessel segmentation task plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and treatment, especially in cardiovascular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and hypertensive retinopathy. Recently, the fully convolutional neural network, as a popular learning-based segmentation method, has been demonstrated to yield highly segmentation performance in vessel wall segmentation tasks. However, the major network factors affecting the performance of segmentation are still not obvious. This paper uses the single-factor control variable method to investigates the effects of network architectures (FCN network and U-Net network) and other network factors (pooling times, patch size, number of skip connection, and network depth) on retinal blood vessel segmentation. Our experiments are performed on two public fundus image database DRIVE and STARE. The results show that U-net is better than FCN and skip connections, proper pooling times, dilated convolution is vital to obtain better performance of retinal vessel segmentation.