Universal Vessel Segmentation for Multi-Modality Retinal Images
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Feb 10, 2025
Abstract
We identify two major limitations in the existing studies on retinal vessel
segmentation: (1) Most existing works are restricted to one modality, i.e, the
Color Fundus (CF). However, multi-modality retinal images are used every day in
the study of retina and retinal diseases, and the study of vessel segmentation
on the other modalities is scarce; (2) Even though a small amount of works
extended their experiments to limited new modalities such as the Multi-Color
Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (MC), these works still require finetuning a
separate model for the new modality. The finetuning will require extra training
data, which is difficult to acquire. In this work, we present a foundational
universal vessel segmentation model (UVSM) for multi-modality retinal images.
Not only do we perform the study on a much wider range of modalities, but we
also propose a universal model to segment the vessels in all these
commonly-used modalities. Despite being much more versatile comparing with
existing methods, our universal model still demonstrates comparable performance
with the state-of-the-art finetuned methods. To the best of our knowledge, this
is the first work that achieves cross-modality retinal vessel segmentation and
also the first work to study retinal vessel segmentation in some novel
modalities.
