Morphology-aware distillation for lightweight retinal vessel segmentation across fundus photography and OCT angiography (opens in new tab)

IntroductionRetinal vessel segmentation is critical for diagnosing ophthalmic and systemic diseases, yet deploying high-performance models in resource-constrained clinical settings remains a challenge. While Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a solution for model compression, conventional KD methods often treat the U-Net as a generic feature extractor, neglecting the unique topological nature of vascular networks. This oversight frequently leads to “fractured” segmentation maps in student mod...