A Skeletal Similarity Metric for Quality Evaluation of Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The most commonly used evaluation metrics for quality assessment of retinal vessel segmentation are sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, which are based on pixel-to-pixel matching. However, due to the inter-observer problem that vessels annotated by different observers vary in both thickness and location, pixel-to-pixel matching is too restrictive to fairly evaluate the results of vessel segmentation. In this paper, the proposed skeletal similarity metric is constructed by comparing the skeleton maps generated from the reference and the source vessel segmentation maps. To address the inter-observer problem, instead of using a pixel-to-pixel matching strategy, each skeleton segment in the reference skeleton map is adaptively assigned with a searching range whose radius is determined based on its vessel thickness. Pixels in the source skeleton map located within the searching range are then selected for similarity calculation. The skeletal similarity consists of a curve similarity, which measures the structural similarity between the reference and the source skeleton maps and a thickness similarity, which measures the thickness consistency between the reference and the source vessel segmentation maps. In contrast to other metrics that provide a global score for the overall performance, we modify the definitions of true positive, false negative, true negative, and false positive based on the skeletal similarity, based on which sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and other objective measurements can be constructed. More importantly, the skeletal similarity metric has better potential to be used as a pixelwise loss function for training deep learning models for retinal vessel segmentation. Through comparison of a set of examples, we demonstrate that the redefined metrics based on the skeletal similarity are more effective for quality evaluation, especially with greater tolerance to the inter-observer problem.