DNL-Net: deformed non-local neural network for blood vessel segmentation

The non-local module has been primarily used in literature to capturing long-range dependencies. However, it suffers from prohibitive computational complexity and lacks the interactions among positions across the channels.

We present a deformed non-local neural network (DNL-Net) for medical image segmentation, which has two prominent components; deformed non-local module (DNL) and multi-scale feature fusion. The former optimizes the structure of the non-local block (NL), hence, reduces the problem of excessive computation and memory usage, significantly. The latter is derived from the attention mechanisms to fuse the features of different levels and improve the ability to exchange information across channels. In addition, we introduce a residual squeeze and excitation pyramid pooling (RSEP) module that is like spatial pyramid pooling to effectively resample the features at different scales and improve the network receptive field.

The proposed method achieved 96.63% and 92.93% for Dice coefficient and mean intersection over union, respectively, on the intracranial blood vessel dataset. Also, DNL-Net attained 86.64%, 96.10%, and 98.37% for sensitivity, accuracy and area under receiver operation characteristic curve, respectively, on the DRIVE dataset.

The overall performance of DNL-Net outperforms other current state-of-the-art vessel segmentation methods, which indicates that the proposed network is more suitable for blood vessel segmentation, and is of great clinical significance.