Assessment of retinal blood vessel segmentation using U-Net model: A deep learning approach

Segmentation of retinal blood vessels from fundus images is vital to assist ophthalmologists in diagnosing different eye diseases like Arteriosclerosis, Glaucoma, Diabetic Retinopathy, Hypertension, and Choroidal Neovascularization. Accurate detection and timely treatment of these eye diseases can prevent irreversible impairment of vision. In computer-aided automatic diagnosis, Preprocessing of fundus images is necessary to reduce the uneven retinal image illumination, as well as the undesirable effect arising from the contrast differences between the retinal blood vessels and the background. In this study, the Hessian-based Frangi vesselness filter is proposed to enhance vasculature in fundus images. This approach seeks to extract thin vessels to diminish the intensity disparity between thick and thin vessels. Its accuracy has never, however, been thoroughly evaluated. To verify the effectiveness of the suggested filter for boosting vessel-like structures in the fundus images, an experimental approach is presented in this paper. The ability of the filter to improve vessel-like structures in fundus images is validated, and an experimental technique for evaluating filter performance using the U-Net model is described. Five quantitative performances, namely Accuracy, Recall, Specificity, Precision, and F1 Score measures on the DRIVE, HRF, DIARETDB1, DIARETDB0, CHASEDB1, ORIGA, DRISHTI GS, DRIONS DB, FIRE, and FIOT datasets, were evaluated and quantified in these experiments to validate the efficacy of the proposed filter. The results demonstrated a noteworthy improvement by achieving an Accuracy of 99.79 %, 99.84 %, 99.64 %, 99.72 %, 99.57 %, 99.48 %, 99.77 %, 99.05 %, 99.93 %, and 99.40 % respectively. Empirical evidence supports the advantages of this approach.