Hierarchical and Multi-scale Attention Network for Retinal Artery/Vein Segmentation and Diameter Estimation
摘要
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and Hypertensive Retinopathy (HR) are major retinal diseases contributing to global visual impairment, where early screening and progression monitoring critically depend on accurate retinal Artery/Vein segmentation and diameter estimation. To address limitations in current methods regarding vessel segmentation and geometric quantification, we propose a framework integrating both segmentation and measurement. The architecture includes three novel deep learning modules: the Hierarchical Feature Extraction and Integration Module (HFEIM) for capturing multi-scale vessel structures, the Adaptive Attention Pooling Module (AAPM) for emphasizing critical vascular regions, and the Multi-Scale Attention Residual Enhancement Module (MSAREM) to enhance detection of fine vessels. Following precise arteriovenous segmentation, we apply skeletonization to extract vessel centerlines, and reconstruct orthogonal elliptical cross-sections along the vessels. The final diameter is derived using the area-equivalent principle, ensuring physiological accuracy. Our approach demonstrates excellent segmentation accuracy and robustness across various arteriovenous segmentation datasets, offering a powerful solution to current challenges in retinal vessel segmentation and retinal diseases detection, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.