RAVIR: A Dataset and Methodology for the Semantic Segmentation and Quantitative Analysis of Retinal Arteries and Veins in Infrared Reflectance Imaging
This work addresses the need for objective assessment of retinal vasculature in diagnosing systemic diseases like hypertension and diabetes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and dataset creation approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of semantic segmentation and quantitative analysis of retinal arteries and veins in infrared reflectance imaging by introducing the RAVIR dataset and SegRAVIR methodology, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art models and setting new benchmarks on datasets like DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB1.
The retinal vasculature provides important clues in the diagnosis and monitoring of systemic diseases including hypertension and diabetes. The microvascular system is of primary involvement in such conditions, and the retina is the only anatomical site where the microvasculature can be directly observed. The objective assessment of retinal vessels has long been considered a surrogate biomarker for systemic vascular diseases, and with recent advancements in retinal imaging and computer vision technologies, this topic has become the subject of renewed attention. In this paper, we present a novel dataset, dubbed RAVIR, for the semantic segmentation of Retinal Arteries and Veins in Infrared Reflectance (IR) imaging. It enables the creation of deep learning-based models that distinguish extracted vessel type without extensive post-processing. We propose a novel deep learning-based methodology, denoted as SegRAVIR, for the semantic segmentation of retinal arteries and veins and the quantitative measurement of the widths of segmented vessels. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of SegRAVIR and demonstrate its superior performance in comparison to state-of-the-art models. Additionally, we propose a knowledge distillation framework for the domain adaptation of RAVIR pretrained networks on color images. We demonstrate that our pretraining procedure yields new state-of-the-art benchmarks on the DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB1 datasets. Dataset link: https://ravirdataset.github.io/data/