Retinal Vessel Segmentation using Deep Neural Networks

Automatic segmentation of blood vessels in fundus images is of great importance as eye diseases as well as some systemic diseases cause observable pathologic modifications. It is a binary classification problem: for each pixel we consider two possible classes (vessel or non-vessel). We use a GPU implementation of deep max-pooling convolutional neural networks to segment blood vessels. We test our method on publiclyavailable DRIVE dataset and our results demonstrate the high effectiveness of the deep learning approach. Our method achieves an average accuracy and AUC of 0.9466 and 0.9749, respectively.