Determination of Fetal Left Ventricular Volume Based on Two-Dimensional Echocardiography.

Li Yu,Ping Chen,Jinhua Yu,Yuanyuan Wang,Yi Guo

doi:10.1155/2017/4797315

Abstract

Determination of fetal left ventricular (LV) volume in two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) is significantly important for quantitative analysis of fetal cardiac function. A backpropagation (BP) neural network method is proposed to predict LV volume more accurately and effectively. The 2DE LV border and volume are considered as the input and output of BP neural network correspondingly. To unify and simplify the input of the BP neural network, 16 distances calculated from the border to its center with equal angle are used instead of the border. Fifty cases (forty frames for each) were used for this study. Half of them selected randomly are used for training, and the others are used for testing. To illustrate the performance of BP neural network, area-length method, Simpson's method, and multivariate nonlinear regression equation method were compared by comparisons with the volume references in concordance correlation coefficient (CCC), intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and Bland-Altman plots. The ICC and CCC for BP neural network with the volume references were the highest. For Bland-Altman plots, the BP neural network also shows the highest agreement and reliability with volume references. With the accurate LV volume, LV function parameters (stroke volume (SV) and ejection fraction (EF)) are calculated accurately.

Highlights

Two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) is the most commonly used technique for evaluation of fetal cardiac function due to its nonradiation, low-cost, and quick acquisition
The single plane-based methods rely on adequate left ventricular (LV) border definition and geometric assumptions to convert 2D area into 3D LV volumes
The BP neural network with a complex network structure may lead to overfitting problems which will decrease the performance of testing

Summary

Introduction

Two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) is the most commonly used technique for evaluation of fetal cardiac function due to its nonradiation, low-cost, and quick acquisition. Accurate quantification of left ventricular (LV) volume is of significant importance for fetal cardiac function analysis [1,2,3]. Several methods based on single plane or biplane have been proposed to determine LV volume in 2DE [4]. The single plane refers to 4-chamber view, and the biplane combines 4-chamber view and 2-chamber view [5]. A single plane is easier to obtain. Single plane-based volume calculation methods are common. The single plane-based methods rely on adequate LV border definition and geometric assumptions to convert 2D area into 3D LV volumes. The fetal LV border can be extracted by manual delineation or automatic segmentation algorithm [6, 7]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion