Abstract
Photoacoustic (PA) technology has been used extensively on vessel imaging due to its capability of identifying molecular specificities and achieving high optical-diffraction-limited lateral resolution down to the cellular level. Vessel images carry essential medical information that provides guidelines for a professional diagnosis. Modern image processing techniques provide a decent contribution to vessel segmentation. However, these methods suffer from under or over-segmentation. Thus, we demonstrate both the results of adopting a fully convolutional network and U-net, and propose a hybrid network consisting of both applied on PA vessel images. Comparison results indicate that the hybrid network can significantly increase the segmentation accuracy and robustness.