Interactive Translation in Echocardiography Training System With Enhanced Cycle-GAN

Long Teng,Zhongliang Fu,Yu Yao

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3000666

Abstract

Interactive translation in echocardiography training system refers to the pixel-wise translation between ultrasound cardiac and theoretical sketch images in the course of hand-on operation. It is capable of efficiently gaining more insights into clinical ultrasound anatomy. However, major studies on the synthesis of ultrasound cardiac image primarily discuss the physical model simulation, while studies on cardiac image segmentation place an emphasis on image processing. Thus, they cannot be easily integrated into one pipeline for interactive translation. This paper presents an enhanced Cycle-GAN for interactive translation. Perceptual loss is introduced to enhance the quality of synthetic ultrasound texture, while Cycle-GAN translates between two modalities. The proposed method is trained on 300 pair images and tested on 68 pair images. As revealed from the experiment results, the proposed method is feasible in interactive translation, and it is superior over Cycle-GAN for ultrasound image synthesis.

Highlights

The echocardiography training system refers to a computerbased novel training machine demonstrating ultrasound cardiac features interactively
PERCEPTUAL LOSS Theoretically, the ultrasound texture is acquired by convolving point-like scatterers in the tissue with the ultrasonic impulse response, which is termed as the point-spread function (PSF) [34]
In this paper, an enhanced Cycle-generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed for interactive translation in the echocardiography training system

Summary

Introduction

The echocardiography training system refers to a computerbased novel training machine demonstrating ultrasound cardiac features interactively. Echocardiography training system can help the trainee master left ventricular structure and function, right ventricular structure and function, valve function, etc. For this reason, numerous corresponding training courses have been formulated to delve into the significant enhancement of trainee’s clinical capability in different hands-on operations [2], [3]. A simple introduction of the training system here and corresponding courses is presented through the link: http://www.iechoonline.com/product/tee/. The interactive translation acts as the underlying function of the echocardiography training system, illustrating different images during hand-on operation. It covers two types of translation, namely, ultrasound image to sketch image(U2S) and sketch image to ultrasound image(S2U)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion