Chaining a U-Net with a Residual U-Net for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation

Abstract

Retina images are the only non-invasive way of accessing the cardiovascular system, offering us a means of observing patterns such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages and the vasculature structure which can be used to diagnose a variety of diseases. The main goal of this paper is to automate retinal blood vessel segmentation with a good tradeoff between blood vessel classification and training time in the presence of high unbalanced classes. In this work, a novel methodology is proposed using two convolutional neural networks (CNN's), chained to each other. The second CNN has been designed with residual network blocks, which joined to the information flow from the first, give us metrics like recall and F1-Score, which are, in most cases, superior to state of the art in vessel segmentation task. We tested this work on two public datasets for blood vessel segmentation in retinal images showing that this work outperforms many of other contributions by other authors.