Multiloss Function Based Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Segmentation of Retinal Vasculature into Arterioles and Venules

The arterioles and venules (AV) classification of retinal vasculature is considered as the first step in the development of an automated system for analysing the vasculature biomarker association with disease prognosis. Most of the existing AV classification methods depend on the accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels. Moreover, the unavailability of large-scale annotated data is a major hindrance in the application of deep learning techniques for AV classification. This paper presents an encoder-decoder based fully convolutional neural network for classification of retinal vasculature into arterioles and venules, without requiring the preliminary step of vessel segmentation. An optimized multiloss function is used to learn the pixel-wise and segment-wise retinal vessel labels. The proposed method is trained and evaluated on DRIVE, AVRDB, and a newly created AV classification dataset; and it attains 96%, 98%, and 97% accuracy, respectively. The new AV classification dataset is comprised of 700 annotated retinal images, which will offer the researchers a benchmark to compare their AV classification results.