Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

MDPI, Sensors, 18(22), p. 6782, 2022

DOI: 10.3390/s22186782

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

HT-Net: A Hybrid Transformer Network for Fundus Vessel Segmentation

Journal article published in 2022 by Xiaolong Hu, Liejun Wang ORCID, Yongming Li ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Doctors usually diagnose a disease by evaluating the pattern of abnormal blood vessels in the fundus. At present, the segmentation of fundus blood vessels based on deep learning has achieved great success, but it still faces the problems of low accuracy and capillary rupture. A good vessel segmentation method can guide the early diagnosis of eye diseases, so we propose a novel hybrid Transformer network (HT-Net) for fundus imaging analysis. HT-Net can improve the vessel segmentation quality by capturing detailed local information and implementing long-range information interactions, and it mainly consists of the following blocks. The feature fusion block (FFB) is embedded in the shallow levels, and FFB enriches the feature space. In addition, the feature refinement block (FRB) is added to the shallow position of the network, which solves the problem of vessel scale change by fusing multi-scale feature information to improve the accuracy of segmentation. Finally, HT-Net’s bottom-level position can capture remote dependencies by combining the Transformer and CNN. We prove the performance of HT-Net on the DRIVE, CHASE_DB1, and STARE datasets. The experiment shows that FFB and FRB can effectively improve the quality of microvessel segmentation by extracting multi-scale information. Embedding efficient self-attention mechanisms in the network can effectively improve the vessel segmentation accuracy. The HT-Net exceeds most existing methods, indicating that it can perform the task of vessel segmentation competently.