Multi-OCDTNet: A Novel Multi-Scale Object Context Dilated Transformer Network for Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation

Abstract

Image segmentation is an essential part of medical image processing, which plays a significant role in adjunctive therapy, disease diagnosis, and medical assessment. To solve the problem of insufficient extracting context information, especially for medical image segmentation, this paper proposes a novel network architecture of multi-scale object context dilated transformer network (Multi-OCDTNet) to improve the utilization and segmentation accuracy for context information. The multi-scale object context transformer module can extract the multi-scale context information of the image through a three-layer transformer structure in a parallel way. The dilated convolution self-aware module can enhance the awareness of multi-scale context information in the feature map through layering transformer block groups and a set of transformer layers. In addition, we propose a composite weight-assigned-based loss function based on DDCLoss and Focal Tversky Loss to improve the stability of the segmentation performance of Multi-OCDTNet by adjusting the weight. The performance of Multi-OCDTNet is validated on the DRIVE and STARE datasets with segmentation accuracy of 97.17% and 97.84%, respectively, indicating the Multi-OCDTNet network possesses a significant competitive advantage in improving the segmentation performance of retinal vessel images.