DD-UNet: Densely Dilated U-Net for Curvilinear Structure Segmentation in Fundus Image

Yindong Zhang, Jie Chen, Li Wang, Miaohong Chen, Guoming Zhang, Jianqiang Li

Abstract: Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is a retina disorder that affects premature infants with lower weights. If the patient cannot get the treatment in time when the illness reaches the last stage, irreversible vision loss will be caused. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little consideration given to the segmentation of the ridge, the key clinical characteristic of the illness. Additionally, existing research has not adequately addressed several segmentation issues, such as fragmentary topology, class imbalance, and false positives. This paper proposes a Densely Dilated U-Net (DD-UNet) improved from U-Net to tackle these challenges. Furthermore, the post-processing techniques based on the spatial relationship between vessels and ridges, along with the relative pixel counts of ridges and false positive results is integrated to mitigate false positive results in the predicted ridge. To enhance the precision of thin vessel, a sliding window sampling method is introduced for refined training. Compared with the state-of-the-art models in medical image segmentation, DD-UNet performs well in curvilinear structure segmentation of fundus image. For instance, our DD-UNet outperforms the Attention U-Net by 6.26% in terms of sensitivity and exhibits a 1.85% higher dice score in ridge segmentation.