Retinal Vessel Segmentation with Deep Graph and Capsule Reasoning
This work addresses the problem of accurate retinal vessel segmentation for medical imaging, representing an incremental advancement by combining existing techniques in a novel way.
The paper tackled retinal vessel segmentation by proposing GCC-UNet, which integrates capsule convolutions with CNNs to capture local and global features, achieving superior performance and setting a new benchmark on public datasets.
Effective retinal vessel segmentation requires a sophisticated integration of global contextual awareness and local vessel continuity. To address this challenge, we propose the Graph Capsule Convolution Network (GCC-UNet), which merges capsule convolutions with CNNs to capture both local and global features. The Graph Capsule Convolution operator is specifically designed to enhance the representation of global context, while the Selective Graph Attention Fusion module ensures seamless integration of local and global information. To further improve vessel continuity, we introduce the Bottleneck Graph Attention module, which incorporates Channel-wise and Spatial Graph Attention mechanisms. The Multi-Scale Graph Fusion module adeptly combines features from various scales. Our approach has been rigorously validated through experiments on widely used public datasets, with ablation studies confirming the efficacy of each component. Comparative results highlight GCC-UNet's superior performance over existing methods, setting a new benchmark in retinal vessel segmentation. Notably, this work represents the first integration of vanilla, graph, and capsule convolutional techniques in the domain of medical image segmentation.