Automated Left Ventricle Dimension Measurement in 2D Cardiac Ultrasound via an Anatomically Meaningful CNN Approach

6 Nov 2019  ·  Andrew Gilbert, Marit Holden, Line Eikvil, Svein Arne Aase, Eigil Samset, Kristin McLeod ·

Two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) measurements of left ventricle (LV) dimensions are highly significant markers of several cardiovascular diseases. These measurements are often used in clinical care despite suffering from large variability between observers. This variability is due to the challenging nature of accurately finding the correct temporal and spatial location of measurement endpoints in ultrasound images. These images often contain fuzzy boundaries and varying reflection patterns between frames. In this work, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) based approach to automate 2DE LV measurements. Treating the problem as a landmark detection problem, we propose a modified U-Net CNN architecture to generate heatmaps of likely coordinate locations. To improve the network performance we use anatomically meaningful heatmaps as labels and train with a multi-component loss function. Our network achieves 13.4%, 6%, and 10.8% mean percent error on intraventricular septum (IVS), LV internal dimension (LVID), and LV posterior wall (LVPW) measurements respectively. The design outperforms other networks and matches or approaches intra-analyser expert error.

PDF Abstract
No code implementations yet. Submit your code now

Tasks


Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods