Cross-Dataset Generalization of Deep Learning for Retinal Vessel Segmentation in Fundus Images: External Evaluation from DRIVE to CHASE_DB1

Abstract

Automated retinal vessel segmentation can support quantitative analysis of fundus photographs and facilitate measurement of vascular characteristics associated with ocular and systemic disease. Although deep-learning methods achieve high segmentation performance on benchmark datasets, their reliability may decrease when applied to images obtained under different acquisition conditions. This study evaluated the cross-dataset generalizability of a U-Net segmentation architecture incorporating an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet34 encoder. Sixteen images from the DRIVE dataset were used for model training and four were retained for in-domain validation. Images were resized to 256 × 256 pixels and processed using a consistent normalization pipeline, while spatial and photometric augmentation was applied during training. Without target-domain retraining or domain adaptation, the trained model was subsequently evaluated on the independent CHASE_DB1 dataset. Segmentation performance was assessed using the Dice coefficient, intersection over union (IoU), and sensitivity, together with qualitative examination of predicted vessel maps. On the held-out DRIVE images, the model achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.7263, IoU of 0.5703, and sensitivity of 0.7201. On CHASE_DB1, performance decreased to 0.6269, 0.4573, and 0.5502, respectively. The disproportionately larger reduction in sensitivity indicated an increased frequency of missed vessel pixels under cross-dataset evaluation. Qualitative examination showed greater fragmentation and omission of fine and peripheral vascular structures in CHASE_DB1 images. These findings demonstrate that within-dataset performance may overestimate the robustness of retinal vessel segmentation models when transferred to a different imaging domain. External evaluation should therefore form an important component of retinal imaging artificial intelligence research. Future work should investigate higher-resolution processing, vessel-width-specific evaluation, multi-domain training, domain-adaptation strategies, and larger multicentre datasets to improve model generalizability.