Retinal Vessel Segmentation

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Retinal vessel segmentation marks vessel pixels in fundus photographs and optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), enabling measurements of vessel density, branching, and disease-related changes. Common approaches include U-Net-style convolutional models with attention or multiscale features, newer transformer and Mamba networks, and topology-aware losses or graph refinement to preserve thin branches and connectivity. Methods are commonly tested on fundus datasets such as DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, FIVES, and HRF, and on OCTA datasets such as OCTA-500, using overlap metrics like Dice alongside sensitivity and topology metrics such as clDice. Key challenges remain in detecting fine vessels, transferring across datasets and imaging modalities, and balancing segmentation accuracy with structural continuity, annotation needs, and computational cost.

Latest papers

25 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Evaluating SAM-based and Convolutional Architectures in Thin Retinal Vessel Segmentation: Model Capacity, Computational Cost and Foundation Pre-training
Oct 30, 2026Carlos Eduardo Fontaneli, Cesar Henrique CominRetinal Vessel Segmentation Thin-Structure Segmentation
Department of Computer Science, Federal University of S˜ao Carlos, Rod. Washington Lu´ıs, km 235, 13565-905, S˜ao Carlos, SP, Brazil
Evidence-Guided Selection of Retinal Vessel Segmentation Pipelines: A Cross-Dataset Benchmark of Performance, Structure, Failure Modes, and Reproducibility
Oct 22, 2026Ruoyu Yan, Yuejia Liu, Shixin Xu +4Retinal Vessel Segmentation Ophthalmic Image Analysis
Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, China · University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada · Beijing Normal–Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China +1
FPG-Seg: Annotation-free Retinal Vessel Topology Segmentation
Oct 15, 2026James Willoughby, Irina VoiculescuRetinal Vessel Segmentation Unsupervised Image Segmentation
University of Oxford, Department of Computer Science
HierarchiRetina: A Diabetic Retinopathy Screening and Grading Cascade with Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts Lesion Segmentation
Oct 13, 2026Md Asif Uddin, Niloy Farhan, Rafeed Rahman +1Diabetic Retinopathy Grading Retinal Disease Classification
The authors are with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Brac University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
CGDD-Net: Context-Guided Dynamic Detail Modeling for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Oct 4, 2026Xincheng Li, Xiaoqi Sheng, Xinyu ZhangRetinal Vessel Segmentation Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
School of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, 1010, New Zealand · School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510641, Guangdong, China
Observer Choice and Threshold Selection in Retinal Vessel Segmentation: A Subject-Separated Evaluation
Sep 22, 2026Wenhao Xu, Yixian Kong, Ting Pan +2Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Zhengzhou Police University, Zhengzhou, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · Qilu University of Technology and Jinan Supercomputing Center, Jinan, China
U-PEN Mamba: Progressive Expansion with Selective State-Space Modeling for Efficient Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Sep 21, 2026Abel A. Reyes-Angulo, Sidike Paheding, Vijayan K. Asari +2Mamba Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA · Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA · University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA +1
An Ultra-Widefield Swept-Source OCTA Dataset and a Polar-Gated Mamba Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Sep 11, 2026Yang Liu, Yibing Shen, Keming Zhao +12Medical Imaging Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shenzhen 518109, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Medical Artificial Intelligence Lab, The First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang 050000, China +2
Retinal OCTA Phenotyping with LLM Reporting for Alzheimer's Disease
Sep 4, 2026Progga Paromita Dutta, Jeba Maliha, Md Rafiul KabirExplainable Medical Image Analysis Optical Coherence Tomography
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA · School of Engineering and Technology, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA
Topology-Aware Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for Cross-Dataset Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Aug 10, 2026Yongsong Huang, Tomo Miyazaki, Kai Xu +3Retinal Vessel Segmentation Domain Adaptation
Tohoku University · Yale University
ESRVS: Extreme Semi-Supervised Retinal Vessel Segmentation with a Single Annotated Image
Jul 27, 2026Mingzhi Xu, Yizhe ZhangImage Segmentation Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China
Investigating the Visual Cues of CNNs for Vascular Segmentation: A Case Study in Microscopy and Fundus Imaging
Jul 25, 2026Weslley dos Santos Silva, Cesar Henrique CominRetinal Vessel Segmentation Medical Image Analysis
Department of Computer Science, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, SP, Brazil
Complementary Roles of Image Classification and Vessel Segmentation in AI-Based Screening for Retinopathy of Prematurity Plus Disease in a Kenyan Preterm Cohort
Jul 7, 2026Fred Mutisya, Oscar Onyango, Sarah Sitati +8Medical Imaging Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Center for Health AI Research, Innovation & Implementation · College of Ophthalmology of Eastern Central and Southern · Kenyatta National Hospital +6
From Convolution to Transformer: A Comparative Study of U-Net Variants for Brain Tumor and Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Jun 20, 2026Khoa Pham, Sindhuja Penchala, Jiacheng Li +2Retinal Vessel Segmentation Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures
Mississippi State University · The University of Alabama
LightVesselNet: An Ultra-Lightweight Sub-100K Parameter Network for Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation
Jun 3, 2026Shadman Sobhan, Farhana JalilEfficient Neural Network Inference Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh.
MARVEL: Universal Murray's Law-informed Vessel Tree Segmentation and Topology Estimation
May 25, 2026Yi Zhou, Thiara Sana Ahmed, Jacqueline Chua +7Retinal Vessel Segmentation Medical Image Analysis
Singapore Eye Research Institute, Singapore National Eye Centre, Singapore · Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences Academic Clinical Program, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore · Centre for Innovation & Precision Eye Health, Department of Ophthalmology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore +12
Local-sensitive connectivity filter (ls-cf): A post-processing unsupervised improvement of the frangi, hessian and vesselness filters for multimodal vessel segmentation
May 20, 2026Erick O Rodrigues, Lucas O Rodrigues, João HP Machado +5Retinal Vessel Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Academic Informatics (DAINF), Universidade Tecnologica Federal do Parana (UTFPR), Pato Branco 85503-390, PR, Brazil · Graduate Program of Sciences Applied to Health Products, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Niteroi 24241000, RJ, Brazil · Institute of Technological Sciences (ICT), Universidade Federal de Itajuba (UNIFEI), Ttabira 35903-087, MG, Brazil +1
Gaze into the Details: Locality-Sensitive Enhancement for OCTA Retinal Vessel Segmentation
May 20, 2026Tuopusen Huang, Ding Ma, Xiangqian WuMedical Imaging Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Faculty of Computing Harbin Institute of Technology Harbin, China
ELEMENT: Multi-Modal Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based on a Coupled Region Growing and Machine Learning Approach
May 19, 2026Erick O. Rodrigues, Aura Conci, Panos LiatsisImage Segmentation Medical Imaging
Academic Department of Informatics, Universidade Tecnologica Federal do Parana (UTFPR), Pato Branco 80230-901, Brazil · Department of Computer Science, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Niteroi 24220-900, Brazil · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi 127788, United Arab Emirates
Polygon-mamba: Retinal vessel segmentation using polygon scanning mamba and space-frequency collaborative attention
May 11, 2026Yuanyuan Peng, Wen LiRetinal Vessel Segmentation Visual SSMs
School of Electrical and Automation Engineering, East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang, 330000, China
VAMAE: Vessel-Aware Masked Autoencoders for OCT Angiography
Apr 8, 2026Ilerioluwakiiye Abolade, Prince Mireku, Kelechi Chibundu +4Masked Autoencoders Self-Supervised Pre-Training
Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria · ML Collective · Ashesi University, Ghana +1
Effect of Input Resolution on Retinal Vessel Segmentation Performance: An Empirical Study Across Five Datasets
Apr 3, 2026Amarnath RThin-Structure Segmentation Retinal Vessel Segmentation
United Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, India
Cross-Domain Vessel Segmentation via Latent Similarity Mining and Iterative Co-Optimization
Apr 2, 2026Zhanqiang Guo, Jianjiang Feng, Jie ZhouRetinal Vessel Segmentation Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Beijing, China
HMS-VesselNet: Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention Network with Topology-Preserving Loss for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Mar 23, 2026Amarnath RRetinal Vessel Segmentation Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
United Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, India
Explainable Convolutional Neural Networks for Retinal Fundus Classification and Cutting-Edge Segmentation Models for Retinal Blood Vessels from Fundus Images
May 12, 2024Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Pronay Debnath +2Explainable Medical Image Analysis Retinal Vessel Segmentation
aDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh

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Evaluating SAM-based and Convolutional Architectures in Thin Retinal Vessel Segmentation: Model Capacity, Computational Cost and Foundation Pre-training

Carlos Eduardo Fontaneli, Cesar Henrique Comin

Department of Computer Science, Federal University of S˜ao Carlos, Rod. Washington Lu´ıs, km 235, 13565-905, S˜ao Carlos, SP, Brazil

Retinal Vessel Segmentation Thin-Structure Segmentation Vision Transformer Vision Foundation Models

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In retinal vessel segmentation, plain Vision Transformers (ViTs) are commonly expected to perform worse than convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on thin vessels, for reasons such as their coarse patch tokenization, their weak locality bias and their need for large training sets. Although this expectation is widely shared in the literature, how plain ViTs actually compare with CNNs on thin vessels has not been systematically quantified. We address this question by comparing a model with a plain ViT encoder (MedSAM), a hybrid Transformer (LiteMedSAM) and three CNNs of different sizes on three retinal datasets (DRIVE, HRF, FIVES) and, as a second-domain check, a microscopy dataset (VessMap). We measured the centerline recall and precision of thin vessels and compared the models while also considering their computational cost and how many epochs they needed to train. We found that the pre-trained MedSAM had a centerline recall of thin vessels that was not significantly different from that of the best CNN on all four datasets (-0.6 to +2.5 percentage points). A compact plain ViT obtained through architecture search but trained from scratch did not retain this performance. For pre-trained plain ViTs, our results do not support the expectation that they miss thin vessels, although similar thin-vessel performance can be obtained with much smaller models.