RCAR-UNet：Retinal Vessels Segmentation Network Based on Rough Channel Attention Mechanism

Sun Ying; Ding Weiping; Huang Jiashuang; Ju Hengrong; Li Ming; Geng Yu

doi:10.7544/issn1000-1239.202110735

Journal of Computer Research and Development > 2023 > 60(4): 947-961. > DOI: 10.7544/issn1000-1239.202110735

Sun Ying, Ding Weiping, Huang Jiashuang, Ju Hengrong, Li Ming, Geng Yu. RCAR-UNet：Retinal Vessels Segmentation Network Based on Rough Channel Attention Mechanism[J]. Journal of Computer Research and Development, 2023, 60(4): 947-961. DOI: 10.7544/issn1000-1239.202110735

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RCAR-UNet：Retinal Vessels Segmentation Network Based on Rough Channel Attention Mechanism

School of Information Science and Technology, Nantong University, Nantong, Jiangsu 226019

Funds: This work was supported by the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61976120), the National Natural Science Foundation of China for Young Scientists (62006128, 62102199), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20191445), the Double-Creation Doctoral Program of Jiangsu Province, the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (SJCX20_1150), the Major Program of the Natural Science Research of Jiangsu Province Higher Education Institutions (21KJA510004), the General Program of the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province Higher Education Institutions (20KJB520009), the Basic Science Research Program of Nantong Science and Technology Bureau (JC2020141, JC2021122), and the Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province.

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Author Bio:
Sun Ying: born in 1997. Master candidate. Her main research interests include granular computing, rough sets, and deep learning

Ding Weiping: born in 1979. PhD, professor, PhD supervisor. Senior member of CCF. His main research interests include data mining, machine learning, granular computing, evolutionary computing, and big data analytics

Huang Jiashuang: born in 1988. PhD, lecturer. His main research interests include brain network analysis and deep learning. （hjshdym@163.com）

Ju Hengrong: born in 1989. PhD, associate professor. His main research interests include granular computing, rough sets, machine learning, and knowledge discovery. （juhengrong@ntu.edu.cn）

Li Ming: born in 1996. Master candidate. His main research interests include data mining, granular computing, and big data analytics. （liming_2014@163.com）

Geng Yu: born in 1998. Master candidate. His main research interests include granular computing, machine learning, and deep learning. （tian19981999@163.com）
Received Date: July 05, 2021
Revised Date: June 22, 2022
Available Online: February 26, 2023

Graphical Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

The health of retinal vessels in fundus images is of great significance for the early diagnosis of various ophthalmic diseases and diabetic cardiovascular diseases, etc. However, the retinal blood vessels are delicate, distributed irregularly and the boundary is ambiguous. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately segment them. Based on the characteristics of retinal blood vessels, we propose a U-shaped network—rough channel attention residual U-Net (RCAR-UNet), which combines rough neurons and channel attention mechanism. Firstly, the network introduces the concept of upper and lower approximation in rough set theory to design rough neurons. Secondly, the rough channel attention module is constructed based on rough neurons, and the module uses global max pooling and global average pooling in U-Net skip connections to construct upper and lower approximation neurons, and performs weighted summation between neurons to reasonably rough the established channel dependencies, which not only contain global information but also have local characteristics, and can effectively achieve accurate rescaling of the extracted retinal vessels features. Then adding residual connections to transfer features directly from the lower to the higher layers, to help solve the network performance degradation problem and effectively extract richer retinal vascular features. Finally, in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed RCAR-UNet model, comparison experiments are performed on three public fundus image datasets with traditional network models such as U-Net, Attention U-Net, etc. The results show that the RCAR-UNet model has high superiority in the accuracy, sensitivity and similarity of blood vessel segmentation.
- rough set,
- rough neuron,
- attention mechanism,
- fundus retinal blood vessels,
- image segmentation,
- residual connection

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References (42)

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