Enhancing Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation through Self-Supervised Pre-Training

Abstract

[Abstract] The segmentation of the retinal vasculature is fundamental in the study of many diseases. However, its manual completion is problematic, which motivates the research on automatic methods. Nowadays, these methods usually employ Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs), whose success is highly conditioned by the network architecture and the availability of many annotated data, something infrequent in medicine. In this work, we present a novel application of self-supervised multimodal pre-training to enhance the retinal vasculature segmentation. The experiments with diverse FCN architectures demonstrate that, independently of the architecture, this pre-training allows one to overcome annotated data scarcity and leads to significantly better results with less training on the target task.