Multi-level deep neural network for efficient segmentation of blood vessels in fundus images

The exact blood vessel trees segmented from fundus images provide important information required for screening and following-up of diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. The trained deep neural network presents an automated prediction of the blood vessels in retinal fundus camera images in the publicly DRIVE database with accuracy up to 0.9533 and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve up to 0.9752, which is better than manual recognition by expert human eyes. A resizing technique is introduced and applied to the multi-level network combining dropout and spatialdropout layers to obtain more generalised training. The proposed model has the potential for the classification of other types of images.