Retinal vessel segmentation using a swin transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture

Elma Shumsun Kamal

doi:10.1007/s11760-025-05089-1

Retinal vessel segmentation using a swin transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture

2026-01-16

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DOI：10.1007/s11760-025-05089-1

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Segmentation of retinal vessels is critical for the identification of diseases like diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma but is time-consuming and requires a lot of manual effort. Classic U-Net architecture excels in processing local details but lacks global context awareness, while transformer-based models are context aware but extremely computationally costly. The trade-off between speed and accuracy in segmentation is challenging. We propose a modified U-Net that integrates Swin Transformer blocks and shift windows to enable context-aware vessel segmentation with lower computational costs. It was trained and evaluated on the DRIVE database, comparing with six different U-Net variants (e.g., Residual, Attention, U-net++) and three hybrid models (e.g., Vision Transformer U-Net). The proposed model in this paper achieved 89.12% accuracy and 0.6023 IoU,0.6917 DSC and 0.6466 a +7.92% accuracy and +0.0891% IoU gain compared to the baseline U-Net with only 11.9M parameters used versus 399M for Vision Transformer U-Net. These findings suggest that the Swin Transformer U-Net is a good trade-off between segmentation quality and computational cost and may open the door for future clinical applications.

Keywords:

Swin transformer

U-net

Retinal vessel

Segmentation

DRIVE dataset

Retinal vessel segmentation using a swin transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture

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