Although the segmentation of retinal vessels in the fundus is of great significance for screening and diagnosing retinal vascular diseases, it remains difficult to detect the low contrast and the information around the lesions provided by retinal vessels in the fundus and to locate and segment micro-vessels in the fine-grained area. To overcome this problem, we propose herein an improved U-Net segmentation method NoL-UNet.

This work introduces NoL-UNet. First of all, the ordinary convolution block of the U-Net network is changed to random dropout convolution blocks, which can better extract the relevant features of the image and effectively alleviate the network overfitting. Next, a NoL-Block attention mechanism added to the bottom of the encoding-decoding structure expands the receptive field and enhances the correlation of pixel information without increasing the number of parameters.

The proposed method is verified by applying it to the fundus image datasets DRIVE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF. The AUC for DRIVE, CHASE_DB1 and HRF is 0.9861, 0.9891 and 0.9893, Se for DRIVE, CHASE_DB1 and HRF is 0.8489, 0.8809 and 0.8476, and the Acc for DRIVE, CHASE_DB1 and HRF is 0.9697, 0.9826 and 0.9732, respectively. The total number of parameters is 1.70M, and for DRIVE, it takes 0.050s to segment an image.

Our method is statistically significantly different from the U-Net method, and the improved method shows superior performance with better accuracy and robustness of the model, which has good practical application in auxiliary diagnosis.

1. Developed computer-aided diagnosis of retinal vascular system for eye diseases. 2. Neural network based on improved attention mechanism to improve the accuracy and robustness of segmentation. 3. Segment retinal blood vessels from DRIVE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF images.