# RetiFluidNet: A Self-Adaptive and Multi-Attention Deep Convolutional Network for Retinal OCT Fluid Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.12468 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12468/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02740/) (2019)
- [Interactive Medical Image Segmentation using Deep Learning with Image-specific Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04043/) (2017)
- [Deep Dual-resolution Networks for Real-time and Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Road Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06085/) (2021)
- [Unified Focal loss: Generalising Dice and cross entropy-based losses to handle class imbalanced medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04525/) (2021)
- [Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Based on Multi-label Deep Network and Polar Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00926/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03402/) (2019)
- [ReLayNet: Retinal Layer and Fluid Segmentation of Macular Optical Coherence Tomography using Fully Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02161/) (2017)
- [Every Annotation Counts: Multi-label Deep Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13243/) (2021)
- [Segmentation-Renormalized Deep Feature Modulation for Unpaired Image Harmonization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06315/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning based Retinal OCT Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09749/) (2018)
- [Pathological Retinal Region Segmentation From OCT Images Using Geometric Relation Based Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14119/) (2020)
- [BARNet: Bilinear Attention Network with Adaptive Receptive Fields for Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07093/) (2020)
- [Segmentation of retinal cysts from Optical Coherence Tomography volumes via selective enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06197/) (2017)
- [A Generalized Motion Pattern and FCN based approach for retinal fluid detection and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01073/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Directional Connectivity-based Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00145/) (2023)
- [OCTDL: Optical Coherence Tomography Dataset for Image-Based Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08255/) (2023)
- [Spatial Coherence Loss: All Objects Matter in Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18698/) (2024)
- [3D Distance-color-coded Assessment of PCI Stent Apposition via Deep-learning-based Three-dimensional Multi-object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20055/) (2024)
- [A Closer Look at Edema Area Segmentation in SD-OCT Images Using Adversarial Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18790/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Source Retinal Fluid Segmentation in OCT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12212/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) helps ophthalmologists assess macular edema, accumulation of fluids, and lesions at microscopic resolution. Quantification of retinal fluids is necessary for OCT-guided treatment management, which relies on a precise image segmentation step. As manual analysis of retinal fluids is a time-consuming, subjective, and error-prone task, there is increasing demand for fast and robust automatic solutions. In this study, a new convolutional neural architecture named RetiFluidNet is proposed for multi-class retinal fluid segmentation. The model benefits from hierarchical representation learning of textural, contextual, and edge features using a new self-adaptive dual-attention (SDA) module, multiple self-adaptive attention-based skip connections (SASC), and a novel multi-scale deep self supervision learning (DSL) scheme. The attention mechanism in the proposed SDA module enables the model to automatically extract deformation-aware representations at different levels, and the introduced SASC paths further consider spatial-channel interdependencies for concatenation of counterpart encoder and decoder units, which improve representational capability. RetiFluidNet is also optimized using a joint loss function comprising a weighted version of dice overlap and edge-preserved connectivity-based losses, where several hierarchical stages of multi-scale local losses are integrated into the optimization process. The model is validated based on three publicly available datasets: RETOUCH, OPTIMA, and DUKE, with comparisons against several baselines. Experimental results on the datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed model in retinal OCT fluid segmentation and reveal that the suggested method is more effective than existing state-of-the-art fluid segmentation algorithms in adapting to retinal OCT scans recorded by various image scanning instruments.