Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model

Abstract Retinal blood vessels are the only blood vessels in the human body that can be observed non-invasively. Changes in vessel morphology are closely associated with hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other systemic diseases, and computers can help doctors identify these changes...

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Main Authors: Kejuan Yue, Lixin Zhan, Zheng Wang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-01-01
Series:Scientific Reports
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83018-x
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author Kejuan Yue
Lixin Zhan
Zheng Wang
author_facet Kejuan Yue
Lixin Zhan
Zheng Wang
author_sort Kejuan Yue
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Retinal blood vessels are the only blood vessels in the human body that can be observed non-invasively. Changes in vessel morphology are closely associated with hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other systemic diseases, and computers can help doctors identify these changes by automatically segmenting blood vessels in fundus images. If we train a highly accurate segmentation model on one dataset (source domain) and apply it to another dataset (target domain) with a different data distribution, the segmentation accuracy will drop sharply, which is called the domain shift problem. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method to address this problem. It uses a teacher–student framework to generate pseudo labels for the target domain image, and trains the student network with a combination of source domain loss and domain adaptation loss; finally, the weights of the teacher network are updated from the exponential moving average of the student network and used for the target domain segmentation. We reconstructed the encoder and decoder of the network into a full-resolution refined model by computing the training loss at multiple semantic levels and multiple label resolutions. We validated our method on two publicly available datasets DRIVE and STARE. From STARE to DRIVE, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 0.9633, 0.8616,and 0.9733, respectively. From DRIVE to STARE, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 0.9687, 0.8470, and 0.9785, respectively. Our method outperforms most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Compared with domain adaptation methods, our method also has the best F1 score (0.8053) from STARE to DRIVE and a competitive F1 score (0.8001) from DRIVE to STARE.
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spelling doaj-art-2d1f94a2823e43398c05d7005d3cd4532025-01-19T12:20:57ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-01-0115111310.1038/s41598-024-83018-xUnsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined modelKejuan Yue0Lixin Zhan1Zheng Wang2School of Computer Science, Hunan First Normal UniversityCollege of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense TechnologySchool of Computer Science, Hunan First Normal UniversityAbstract Retinal blood vessels are the only blood vessels in the human body that can be observed non-invasively. Changes in vessel morphology are closely associated with hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other systemic diseases, and computers can help doctors identify these changes by automatically segmenting blood vessels in fundus images. If we train a highly accurate segmentation model on one dataset (source domain) and apply it to another dataset (target domain) with a different data distribution, the segmentation accuracy will drop sharply, which is called the domain shift problem. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method to address this problem. It uses a teacher–student framework to generate pseudo labels for the target domain image, and trains the student network with a combination of source domain loss and domain adaptation loss; finally, the weights of the teacher network are updated from the exponential moving average of the student network and used for the target domain segmentation. We reconstructed the encoder and decoder of the network into a full-resolution refined model by computing the training loss at multiple semantic levels and multiple label resolutions. We validated our method on two publicly available datasets DRIVE and STARE. From STARE to DRIVE, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 0.9633, 0.8616,and 0.9733, respectively. From DRIVE to STARE, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 0.9687, 0.8470, and 0.9785, respectively. Our method outperforms most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Compared with domain adaptation methods, our method also has the best F1 score (0.8053) from STARE to DRIVE and a competitive F1 score (0.8001) from DRIVE to STARE.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83018-xRetinal vessel segmentationDomain adaptationTeacher–student networkFull-resolution
spellingShingle Kejuan Yue
Lixin Zhan
Zheng Wang
Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model
Scientific Reports
Retinal vessel segmentation
Domain adaptation
Teacher–student network
Full-resolution
title Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model
title_full Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model
title_fullStr Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model
title_full_unstemmed Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model
title_short Unsupervised domain adaptation teacher–student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full-resolution refined model
title_sort unsupervised domain adaptation teacher student network for retinal vessel segmentation via full resolution refined model
topic Retinal vessel segmentation
Domain adaptation
Teacher–student network
Full-resolution
url https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83018-x
work_keys_str_mv AT kejuanyue unsuperviseddomainadaptationteacherstudentnetworkforretinalvesselsegmentationviafullresolutionrefinedmodel
AT lixinzhan unsuperviseddomainadaptationteacherstudentnetworkforretinalvesselsegmentationviafullresolutionrefinedmodel
AT zhengwang unsuperviseddomainadaptationteacherstudentnetworkforretinalvesselsegmentationviafullresolutionrefinedmodel