A task-unified network with transformer and spatial–temporal convolution for left ventricular quantification

Abstract

Quantification of the cardiac function is vital for diagnosing and curing the cardiovascular diseases. Left ventricular function measurement is the most commonly used measure to evaluate the function of cardiac in clinical practice, how to improve the accuracy of left ventricular quantitative assessment results has always been the subject of research by medical researchers. Although considerable efforts have been put forward to measure the left ventricle (LV) automatically using deep learning methods, the accurate quantification is yet a challenge work as a result of the changeable anatomy structure of heart in the systolic diastolic cycle. Besides, most methods used direct regression method which lacks of visual based analysis. In this work, a deep learning segmentation and regression task-unified network with transformer and spatial–temporal convolution is proposed to segment and quantify the LV simultaneously. The segmentation module leverages a U-Net like 3D Transformer model to predict the contour of three anatomy structures, while the regression module learns spatial–temporal representations from the original images and the reconstruct feature map from segmentation path to estimate the finally desired quantification metrics. Furthermore, we employ a joint task loss function to train the two module networks. Our framework is evaluated on the MICCAI 2017 Left Ventricle Full Quantification Challenge dataset. The results of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, which achieves competitive cardiac quantification metric results and at the same time produces visualized segmentation results that are conducive to later analysis.