Volume 32, Issue 5 pp. 1588-1603
RESEARCH ARTICLE

MR-UNet: An UNet model using multi-scale and residual convolutions for retinal vessel segmentation

Xin Yang

Corresponding Author

Xin Yang

College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

Correspondence

Xin Yang, College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China.

Email: [email protected]

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Li Liu

Li Liu

College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

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Tao Li

Tao Li

College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

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First published: 18 March 2022
Citations: 6

Funding information: Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Grant/Award Number: NS2020025; National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 62073164, 61573182

Abstract

The overall performance of the retinal vessel segmentation network based on improved UNet is excellent, but there is still room for improvement in the small blood vessel segmentation. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved MR-UNet, which designs two new blocks: the multi-scale convolution (Multiconv) block and the residual convolution (Resconv) block. The Multiconv block uses different size convolution kernels to extract the characteristics of different thicknesses of retinal blood vessels, thereby improving the model's ability to segment small blood vessels. The Resconv block uses different convolutional layers to process the shallow semantic information in the encoding stage and then concatenates it to the decoding stage, reducing the semantic difference between the encoder and the decoder. On the retinal data sets DRIVE, STARE and CHASE_DB1, the accuracy (Acc) of this model is 0.9705, 0.9747, 0.9778, the specificity (Sp) is 0.9863, 0.9892, 0.9930, the AUC is 0.9872, 0.9849, 0.9925, and the F1-Score is 0.8270, 0.8134, 0.8460, respectively. Compared with the original UNet, Se, Sp, and F1-Score of MR-UNet increase by 2.5%, 0.5%, and 0.4%, respectively, proving that MR-UNet has better comprehensive performance.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

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