A shallow u-net with split-fused attention mechanism for retinal vessel segmentation

Extraction of retinal vascular parts is an important task in retinal disease diagnosis. Precise segmentation of the retinal vascular pattern is challenging due to its complex structure, overlapping with other anatomical structures, and crucial thin vascular structures. In recent years, complex and heavy deep learning networks have been proposed to segment retinal blood vessels accurately. However, these methods fail to detect the thin vascular structure among different patterns of thick vessels. An attention-based novel architecture is proposed to segment the thin vasculature to address this limitation. The proposed model comprises a shallow U-Net based encoder-decoder architecture with split-fuse attention (SFA) block. The proposed SFA block enables the network to identify the placement of pixels for the tree-shaped vessel patterns at their relative position during the reconstruction phase in the decoder. The attention block aggregates low-level and high-level semantic information, improving the vessel segmentation performance. Experimentation performed on publicly available fundus datasets, DRIVE, HRF, CHASE-DB1, and STARE show that the proposed method performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate the adaptability of the proposed model for clinical applications due to its low memory footprint and better performance.