Deep Learning Methods for Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation: Evaluation on Images with Retinopathy of Prematurity

Automatic blood vessel segmentation from retinal images plays an important role in the diagnosis of many systemic and eye diseases, including retinopathy of prematurity. Current state-of-the-art research in blood vessel segmentation from retinal images is based on convolutional neural networks. The solutions proposed so far are trained and tested on images from a few available retinal blood vessel segmentation datasets, which might limit their performance when given an image with retinopathy of prematurity signs. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three high-performing convolutional neural networks for retinal blood vessel segmentation in the context of blood vessel segmentation on retinopathy of prematurity retinal images. The main motive behind the study is to test if existing public datasets suffice to develop a high-performing predictor that could assist an ophthalmologist in retinopathy of prematurity diagnosis. To do so, we create a dataset consisting solely of retinopathy of prematurity images with retinal blood vessel annotations manually labeled by two observers, where one is the ophthalmologist experienced in retinopathy of prematurity treatment. Experimental results show that all three solutions have difficulties in detecting the retinal blood vessels of infants due to a lower contrast compared to images from public datasets as demonstrated by a significant drop in classification sensitivity. All three solutions segment alongside retinal also choroidal blood vessels which are not used to diagnose retinopathy of prematurity, but instead represent noise and are confused with retinal blood vessels. By visual and numerical observations, we observe that existing solutions for retinal blood vessel segmentation need improvement toward more detailed datasets or deeper models in order to assist the ophthalmologist in retinopathy of prematurity diagnosis.

Overview of Deep Learning Methods for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Methods for automated retinal vessel segmentation play an important role in the treatment and diagnosis of many eye and systemic diseases. With the fast development of deep learning methods, more and more retinal vessel segmentation methods are implemented as deep neural networks. In this paper, we provide a brief review of recent deep learning methods from highly influential journals and conferences. The review objectives are: (1) to assess the design characteristics of the latest methods, (2) to report and analyze quantitative values of performance evaluation metrics, and (3) to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the recent solutions.

Non-adversarial Robustness of Deep Learning Methods for Computer Vision

Non-adversarial robustness, also known as natural robustness, is a property of deep learning models that enables them to maintain performance even when faced with distribution shifts caused by natural variations in data. However, achieving this property is challenging because it is difficult to predict in advance the types of distribution shifts that may occur. To address this challenge, researchers have proposed various approaches, some of which anticipate potential distribution shifts, while others utilize knowledge about the shifts that have already occurred to enhance model generalizability. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the most recent techniques for improving the robustness of computer vision methods, as well as a summary of commonly used robustness benchmark datasets for evaluating the model's performance under data distribution shifts. Finally, we examine the strengths and limitations of the approaches reviewed and identify general trends in deep learning robustness improvement for computer vision.