Joint Segment-Level and Pixel-Wise Losses for Deep Learning Based Retinal Vessel Segmentation.

Journal: IEEE transactions on bio-medical engineering
Published Date:

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Deep learning based methods for retinal vessel segmentation are usually trained based on pixel-wise losses, which treat all vessel pixels with equal importance in pixel-to-pixel matching between a predicted probability map and the corresponding manually annotated segmentation. However, due to the highly imbalanced pixel ratio between thick and thin vessels in fundus images, a pixel-wise loss would limit deep learning models to learn features for accurate segmentation of thin vessels, which is an important task for clinical diagnosis of eye-related diseases.

Authors

  • Zengqiang Yan
  • Xin Yang
    Department of Oral Maxillofacial-Head Neck Oncology, Ninth People's Hospital, College of Stomatology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, National Clinical Research Center for Oral Diseases, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Stomatology & Shanghai Research Institute of Stomatology, Shanghai, China.
  • Kwang-Ting Cheng