SERR-U-Net: Squeeze-and-Excitation Residual and Recurrent Block-Based U-Net for Automatic Vessel Segmentation in Retinal Image

METHODS: A new SERR-U-Net framework for retinal vessel segmentation is proposed, which leverages technologies including Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE), residual module, and recurrent block. First, the convolution layers of encoder and decoder are modified on the basis of U-Net, and the recurrent block is used to increase the network depth. Second, the residual module is utilized to alleviate the vanishing gradient problem. Finally, to derive more specific vascular features, we employed the SE structure to introduce attention mechanism into the U-shaped network. In addition, enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial networks (ESRGANs) are also deployed to remove the noise of retinal image. RESULTS: The effectiveness of this method was tested on two public datasets, DRIVE and STARE. In the experiment of DRIVE dataset, the accuracy and AUC (area under the curve) of our method were 0.9552 and 0.9784, respectively, and for SATRE dataset, 0.9796 and 0.9859 were achieved, respectively, which proved a high accuracy and promising prospect on clinical assistance. CONCLUSION: An improved U-Net network combining SE, ResNet, and recurrent technologies is developed for automatic vessel segmentation from retinal image. This new model enables an improvement on the accuracy compared to learning-based methods, and its robustness in circumvent challenging cases such as small blood vessels and intersection of vessels is also well demonstrated and validated.