Feature Enhancer Segmentation Network (FES-Net) for Vessel Segmentation
This addresses the need for precise segmentation in medical imaging to track diseases like diabetic retinopathy, though it appears incremental as it builds on encoder-decoder structures.
The paper tackles the problem of retinal vessel segmentation for diagnosing eye diseases by proposing FES-Net, which achieves superior performance on four public datasets compared to existing methods.
Diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration pose a significant risk to vision, highlighting the importance of precise segmentation of retinal vessels for the tracking and diagnosis of progression. However, existing vessel segmentation methods that heavily rely on encoder-decoder structures struggle to capture contextual information about retinal vessel configurations, leading to challenges in reconciling semantic disparities between encoder and decoder features. To address this, we propose a novel feature enhancement segmentation network (FES-Net) that achieves accurate pixel-wise segmentation without requiring additional image enhancement steps. FES-Net directly processes the input image and utilizes four prompt convolutional blocks (PCBs) during downsampling, complemented by a shallow upsampling approach to generate a binary mask for each class. We evaluate the performance of FES-Net on four publicly available state-of-the-art datasets: DRIVE, STARE, CHASE, and HRF. The evaluation results clearly demonstrate the superior performance of FES-Net compared to other competitive approaches documented in the existing literature.