MAFE-Net: retinal vessel segmentation based on a multiple attention-guided fusion mechanism and ensemble learning network

The precise and automatic recognition of retinal vessels is of utmost importance in the prevention, diagnosis and assessment of certain eye diseases, yet it brings a nontrivial uncertainty for this challenging detection mission due to the presence of intricate factors, such as uneven and indistinct curvilinear shapes, unpredictable pathological deformations, and non-uniform contrast. Therefore, we propose a unique and practical approach based on a multiple attention-guided fusion mechanism and ensemble learning network (MAFE-Net) for retinal vessel segmentation. In conventional UNet-based models, long-distance dependencies are explicitly modeled, which may cause partial scene information loss. To compensate for the deficiency, various blood vessel features can be extracted from retinal images by using an attention-guided fusion module. In the skip connection part, a unique spatial attention module is applied to remove redundant and irrelevant information; this structure helps to better integrate low-level and high-level features. The final step involves a DropOut layer that removes some neurons randomly to prevent overfitting and improve generalization. Moreover, an ensemble learning framework is designed to detect retinal vessels by combining different deep learning models. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, experimental results were verified in public datasets STARE, DRIVE, and CHASEDB1, which achieved F1 scores of 0.842, 0.825, and 0.814, and Accuracy values of 0.975, 0.969, and 0.975, respectively. Compared with eight state-of-the-art models, the designed model produces satisfactory results both visually and quantitatively.