Automated analysis of 3D-echocardiography using spatially registered patient-specific CMR meshes
Authors: Zhao D , Ferdian E , Maso Talou GD , Quill GM , Gilbert K , Babarenda Gamage TP , Wang VY , Pedrosa J , D"hooge J , Legget M , Ruygrok PN , Doughty RN , Camara O , Young AA , Nash MP 
Published: February 2021

Funding Acknowledgements

Type of funding sources: Public grant(s) – National budget only. Main funding source(s): National Heart Foundation (NHF) of New Zealand Health Research Council (HRC) of New Zealand

Artificial intelligence shows considerable promise for automated analysis and interpretation of medical images, particularly in the domain of cardiovascular imaging. While application to cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) has demonstrated excellent results, automated analysis of 3D echocardiography (3D-echo) remains challenging, due to the lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal dropout, and greater interobserver variability in manual annotations. As 3D-echo is becoming increasingly widespread, robust analysis methods will substantially benefit patient evaluation. 

We sought to leverage the high SNR of CMR to provide training data for a convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of analysing 3D-echo. We imaged 73 participants (53 healthy volunteers, 20 patients with non-ischaemic cardiac disease) under both CMR and 3D-echo (&lt;1 hour between scans). 3D models of the left ventricle (LV) were independently constructed from CMR and 3D-echo, and used to spatially align the image volumes using least squares fitting to a cardiac template. The resultant transformation was used to map the CMR mesh to the 3D-echo image. Alignment of mesh and image was verified through volume slicing and visual inspection (Fig. 1) for 120 paired datasets (including 47 rescans) each at end-diastole and end-systole.

100 datasets (80 for training, 20 for validation) were used to train a shallow CNN for mesh extraction from 3D-echo, optimised with a composite loss function consisting of normalised Euclidian distance (for 290 mesh points) and volume. Data augmentation was applied in the form of rotations and tilts (&lt;15 degrees) about the long axis. The network was tested on the remaining 20 datasets (different participants) of varying image quality (Tab. I). For comparison, corresponding LV measurements from conventional manual analysis of 3D-echo and associated interobserver variability (for two observers) were also estimated.

Initial results indicate that the use of embedded CMR meshes as training data for 3D-echo analysis is a promising alternative to manual analysis, with improved accuracy and precision compared with conventional methods. Further optimisations and a larger dataset are expected to improve network performance.

(n = 20) LV EDV (ml) LV ESV (ml) LV EF (%) LV mass (g) Ground truth CMR 150.5 ± 29.5 57.9 ± 12.7 61.5 ± 3.4 128.1 ± 29.8 Algorithm error -13.3 ± 15.7 -1.4 ± 7.6 -2.8 ± 5.5 0.1 ± 20.9 Manual error -30.1 ± 21.0 -15.1 ± 12.4 3.0 ± 5.0 Not available Interobserver error 19.1 ± 14.3 14.4 ± 7.6 -6.4 ± 4.8 Not available Tab. 1. LV mass and volume differences (means ± standard deviations) for 20 test cases. Algorithm: CNN – CMR (as ground truth). Abstract Figure. Fig 1. CMR mesh registered to 3D-echo.