Delineation Of Left Ventricle Research Articles

Fully Automatic Left Ventricle Segmentation Using Bilateral Lightweight Deep Neural Network.

The segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) is one of the fundamental procedures that must be performed to obtain quantitative measures of the heart, such as its volume, area, and ejection fraction. In clinical practice, the delineation of LV is still often conducted semi-automatically, leaving it open to operator subjectivity. The automatic LV segmentation from echocardiography images is a challenging task due to poorly defined boundaries and operator dependency. Recent research has demonstrated that deep learning has the capability to employ the segmentation process automatically. However, the well-known state-of-the-art segmentation models still lack in terms of accuracy and speed. This study aims to develop a single-stage lightweight segmentation model that precisely and rapidly segments the LV from 2D echocardiography images. In this research, a backbone network is used to acquire both low-level and high-level features. Two parallel blocks, known as the spatial feature unit and the channel feature unit, are employed for the enhancement and improvement of these features. The refined features are merged by an integrated unit to segment the LV. The performance of the model and the time taken to segment the LV are compared to other established segmentation models, DeepLab, FCN, and Mask RCNN. The model achieved the highest values of the dice similarity index (0.9446), intersection over union (0.8445), and accuracy (0.9742). The evaluation metrics and processing time demonstrate that the proposed model not only provides superior quantitative results but also trains and segments the LV in less time, indicating its improved performance over competing segmentation models.

Fully Automated Quantification of Cardiac Indices from Cine MRI Using a Combination of Convolution Neural Networks.

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) is one of the most accurate non-invasive modalities for evaluation of cardiac function, especially the left ventricle (LV). In this modality, the manual or semi-automatic delineation of LV by experts is currently the standard clinical practice for chambers segmentation. Despite these efforts, global quantification of LV remains a challenge. In this work, a combination of two convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for quantitative evaluation of the LV is described, which estimates the cavity and the myocardium areas, endocardial cavity dimensions in three directions, and the myocardium regional wall thickness in six radial directions. The method was validated in CMRI exams of 56 patients (LVQuan19 dataset) and evaluated by metrics Dice Index, Mean Absolute Error, and Correlation with superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The combination of the CNN architectures provided a simpler yet fully automated approach, requiring no specialist interaction.Clinical Relevance- With the proposed method, it is possible to perform automatically the full quantification of regional clinically relevant parameters of the left ventricle in short-axis CMRI images with superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.