Improved Blood Vessels Segmentation of Retinal Image of Infants

Vijay Kumar, Het Patel, Kolin Paul, Abhidnya Surve, Shorya Azad, Rohan Chawla

2022

Abstract

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is the leading cause of blindness in premature babies worldwide. ROP is quantified through the structural information of the retinal vessel map, such as vessels width, tortuosity and extent. Therefore, the accuracy of quantitative studies depends on the quality of the segmented blood vessels’ map. Fundus images used for neonatal eye examination are prone to many artefacts and noises due to patient movement, erratic illumination, improperly focused camera sensor, etc. Existing vessel segmentation algorithms work well on retinal images of adults but fail to detect underdeveloped vessel structures of neonatal’s fundus images. At the same time, the unavailability of fundus images of infants has hindered the development of the data-driven methods for vessel segmentation. This work proposes a new Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) based vessels segmentation system for the screening for the neonatal eye disorder ROP. The proposed system uses a DCNN, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) Pix2Pix or U-Net for vessel segmentation. Using publicly available fundus image datasets, we used an efficient and robust training procedure for the proposed system and tested them with preterm neonatal eye images from a local hospital. Experimental results show that the proposed system allows better screening of ROP with robustness to noises and inter-class variation. It has achieved an average accuracy of 96.69% for vessels segmentation and a Dice coefficient between 0.60 and 0.64. Our system is able to achieve an accuracy of 88.23% for Zone-1 case of ROP.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kumar V., Patel H., Paul K., Surve A., Azad S. and Chawla R. (2022). Improved Blood Vessels Segmentation of Retinal Image of Infants. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2022) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-552-4, SciTePress, pages 142-153. DOI: 10.5220/0010849800003123

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf22,
author={Vijay Kumar and Het Patel and Kolin Paul and Abhidnya Surve and Shorya Azad and Rohan Chawla},
title={Improved Blood Vessels Segmentation of Retinal Image of Infants},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2022) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2022},
pages={142-153},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010849800003123},
isbn={978-989-758-552-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2022) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Improved Blood Vessels Segmentation of Retinal Image of Infants
SN - 978-989-758-552-4
AU - Kumar V.
AU - Patel H.
AU - Paul K.
AU - Surve A.
AU - Azad S.
AU - Chawla R.
PY - 2022
SP - 142
EP - 153
DO - 10.5220/0010849800003123
PB - SciTePress