Optimized Vessel Segmentation: A Structure-Agnostic Approach With Small Vessel Enhancement and Morphological Correction

Accurate segmentation of blood vessels is essential for various clinical assessments and postoperative analyses. However, the inherent challenges of vascular imaging-such as sparsity, fine granularity, low contrast, data distribution variability, and the critical need for preserving topological integrity-make generalized vessel segmentation particularly complex. While specialized segmentation methods have been developed for specific anatomical regions, their over-reliance on tailored models hinders broader applicability and generalization. General-purpose segmentation models introduced in medical imaging often fail to address critical vascular characteristics, including the connectivity of segmentation results. In this study, we propose OVS-Net, an optimized vessel segmentation framework designed to generalize across diverse vessel structures and imaging modalities. It introduces a dual-branch architecture design for improving small vessel segmentation and a morphology-aware correction module to preserve vascular topology and connectivity. We compiled a comprehensive multi-modality dataset from 17 datasets to train and benchmark the proposed OVS-Net against 6 SAM-based methods and 17 expert models under various conditions. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior segmentation accuracy, generalization, and a 34.6% improvement in connectivity, underscoring its potential for clinical applications. The code and dataset information are available at https://github.com/Hk416mod2/OVS-Net.