Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based on Conditional Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks

The segmentation of retinal vessels is of significance for doctors to diagnose the fundus diseases. However, existing methods have various problems in the segmentation of the retinal vessels, such as insufficient segmentation of retinal vessels, weak anti-noise interference ability, and sensitivity to lesions, etc. Aiming to the shortcomings of existed methods, this paper proposes the use of conditional deep convolutional generative adversarial networks to segment the retinal vessels. We mainly improve the network structure of the generator. The introduction of the residual module at the convolutional layer for residual learning makes the network structure sensitive to changes in the output, as to better adjust the weight of the generator. In order to reduce the number of parameters and calculations, using a small convolution to halve the number of channels in the input signature before using a large convolution kernel. By used skip connection to connect the output of the convolutional layer with the output of the deconvolution layer to avoid low-level information sharing. By verifying the method on the DRIVE and STARE datasets, the segmentation accuracy rate is 96.08% and 97.71%, the sensitivity reaches 82.74% and 85.34% respectively, and the F-measure reaches 82.08% and 85.02% respectively. The sensitivity is 4.82% and 2.4% higher than that of R2U-Net.