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Joint 2D attention gate and channel-spatial attention network for retinal vessel segmentation of OCT-angiography images

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Abstract

OCT-angiography is a non-invasive visualization imaging technology with high resolution that can more clearly image tiny blood vessels. Certain ophthalmic diseases can be diagnosed by the morphological changes of retinal blood vessels, and the automatic segmentation of blood vessel will definitely reduce workload of ophthalmologists. Current segmentation methods result in the loss of important detailed features and the segmenting failure of tiny blood vessels. We propose a joint 2D attention gate and channel-spatial attention network for the retinal vessel segmentation of OCT-angiography images to improve accuracy and reduce error rate. The improved 2D attention gate introduces attention coefficients to increase the weight of the blood vessel area, which preserves the branch structure and edge information of tiny blood vessels to a greater extent by combining context feature information of different levels of units. The channel-spatial attention block is used to enhance channel and spatial channel information, respectively. To enhance the credibility, our network was tested on two public data sets. Compared with channel and spatial attention network, U-Net with residual block and U-Net, the important indicator of accuracy is increased by 1.97%, 2.18% and 3.04%, respectively, in data set I and increased by 0.18%, 0.19% and 0.62%, respectively, in data set II.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No: ZR2020MF105), Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Optical Imaging Technology (No: 2020B121201010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Qufu Normal University, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Qufu, 273165, China

    Baoyu Cui, Sumin Qi & Yingjie Jiang

  2. Qufu Normal University, School of Computing, Rizhao, 276827, China

    Jing Meng

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  1. Baoyu Cui
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  2. Sumin Qi
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  4. Yingjie Jiang
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Correspondence to Sumin Qi.

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Cui, B., Qi, S., Meng, J. et al. Joint 2D attention gate and channel-spatial attention network for retinal vessel segmentation of OCT-angiography images. SIViP 17, 1219–1226 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02329-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02329-6

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