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U-Net with Hierarchical Bottleneck Attention for Landmark Detection in Fundus Images of the Degenerated Retina

9 Jul 2021arXiv:2107.04721archive 2025-07-28

Shuyun Tang, Ziming Qi, Jacob Granley, Michael Beyeler

Fundus photography has routinely been used to document the presence and severity of retinal degenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in clinical practice, for which the fovea and optic disc (OD) are important retinal landmarks. However, the occurrence of lesions, drusen, and other retinal abnormalities during retinal degeneration severely complicates automatic landmark detection and segmentation. Here we propose HBA-U-Net: a U-Net backbone enriched with hierarchical bottleneck attention. The network consists of a novel bottleneck attention block that combines and refines self-attention, channel attention, and relative-position attention to highlight retinal abnormalities that may be important for fovea and OD segmentation in the degenerated retina. HBA-U-Net achieved state-of-the-art results on fovea detection across datasets and eye conditions (ADAM: Euclidean Distance (ED) of 25.4 pixels, REFUGE: 32.5 pixels, IDRiD: 32.1 pixels), on OD segmentation for AMD (ADAM: Dice Coefficient (DC) of 0.947), and on OD detection for DR (IDRiD: ED of 20.5 pixels). Our results suggest that HBA-U-Net may be well suited for landmark detection in the presence of a variety of retinal degenerative diseases.

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Code

bionicvisionlab/2021-HBA-U-Net mentioned on GitHubtf report

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Tasks

Fovea DetectionOptic Disc DetectionOptic Disc SegmentationSegmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Fovea Detection ADAM HBA-U-Net Euclidean Distance (ED) 25.4 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Fovea Detection IDRiD HBA-U-Net Euclidean Distance (ED) 32.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Fovea Detection REFUGE HBA-U-Net Euclidean Distance (ED) 32.5 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Optic Disc Detection IDRiD HBA-U-Net Euclidean Distance (ED) 20.5 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Concatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionMax PoolingReLUU-Net

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