Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2110.15144

Deep Learning Analysis of Cardiac MRI in Legacy Datasets: Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis

Abstract

The shape and motion of the heart provide essential clues to understanding the mechanisms of cardiovascular disease. With the advent of large-scale cardiac imaging data, statistical atlases become a powerful tool to provide automated and precise quantification of the status of patient-specific heart geometry with respect to reference populations. The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), begun in 2000, was the first large cohort study to incorporate cardiovascular MRI in over 5000 participants, and there is now a wealth of follow-up data over 20 years. Building a machine learning based automated analysis is necessary to extract the additional imaging information necessary for expanding original manual analyses. However, machine learning tools trained on MRI datasets with different pulse sequences fail on such legacy datasets. Here, we describe an automated atlas construction pipeline using deep learning methods applied to the legacy cardiac MRI data in MESA. For detection of anatomical cardiac landmark points, a modified VGGNet convolutional neural network architecture was used in conjunction with a transfer learning sequence between two-chamber, four-chamber, and short-axis MRI views. A U-Net architecture was used for detection of the endocardial and epicardial boundaries in short axis images. Both network architectures resulted in good segmentation and landmark detection accuracies compared with inter-observer variations. Statistical relationships with common risk factors were similar between atlases derived from automated vs manual annotations. The automated atlas can be employed in future studies to examine the relationships between cardiac morphology and future events.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Avan Suinesiaputra, Charlene A Mauger, Bharath Ambale-Venkatesh, David A Bluemke, Josefine Dam Gade, Kathleen Gilbert, Mark Janse, Line Sofie Hald, Conrad Werkhoven, Colin Wu, Joao A Lima, Alistair A Young. 2021-10-28. Deep Learning Analysis of Cardiac MRI in Legacy Datasets: Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2021.807728

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

IViT: A Novel Interpretable Visual Transformer for Skin Disease Detection

The clinical diagnosis of skin diseases is susceptible to interference from inter-class similarity of skin lesions, and over-reliance on clinicians'experience easily leads to subjective bias. Although existing deep learning aided diagnosis methods achieve competitive accuracy, they suffer from the black-box opacity of Vision Transformer (ViT) and poor adaptability to medical few-shot scenarios. Moreover, mainstream explainable algorithms generally face the bottleneck of significant accuracy degradation when improving interpretability. This paper proposes an interpretable ViT (IViT) constrained by Quadratic Programming (QP). The introduced pre-trained transfer learning adapts to few-shot feature extraction. A discrete QP feature selection framework is constructed to screen generic and discriminative features consistent with clinical diagnostic logic. A multi-objective loss function is designed to reduce feature redundancy and optimize activation distribution while preserving classification performance. Experimental results on six standard skin disease datasets show that IViT achieves an accuracy of 93.80%, only 0.21% lower than the baseline, with feature redundancy reduced by 29.5%. Its core activation regions are consistent with clinically concerned lesion areas. The proposed model balances accuracy and interpretability, providing a reliable solution for the clinical deployment of few-shot intelligent skin disease diagnosis.

eess.IV

Automated Distinction of Intimal and Medial Intracranial Arterial Calcification from CT Head

Intracranial arterial calcifications (IACs) are a common finding on clinical non-contrast enhanced head CT scans and are associated with neurovascular disease. Calcifications can occur in the intimal or medial layer of the arterial wall, subtypes that differ in aetiology and may have distinct clinical relevance. These subtypes can be visually distinguished by radiologists based on the shape of the calcifications. We investigate three automated approaches for subtype classification of IAC from head CT-derived segmentation masks: (1) an automated adaptation of the established radiological visual score, (2) a sphericity-based method, and (3) a method based on shape embeddings extracted by a medical shape foundation model. All approaches use the same lightweight classification pipeline on top of the features they compute and are evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. The three methods achieved comparable performance, with the embedding-based approach yielding the best overall results with a weighted F1 (mean $\pm$ SD) of up to 71.5 $\pm$ 3.7 for a single artery and 59.8 $\pm$ 1.7 for the joint artery classification. Performance was largely preserved when using automated instead of manual IAC segmentation masks, and we found the difference in weighted F1 not significant. Our results show that fully automated IAC subtype quantification from head CT is feasible and remains robust to the use of manual and automated IAC segmentation masks. Code at https://github.com/bjin96/iac-subtyping.

eess.IV

Recasting the Destroy Step of Large Neighborhood Search as Dense Segmentation

Large neighborhood search improves an incumbent by releasing selected variables and repairing the resulting subproblem under a time limit. FOVEA casts variable selection as dense semantic segmentation on a fixed $128\times128$ canvas. A small U-Net reads twelve semantic channels and predicts cell scores, which are decoded into a variable set subject to a fixed variable budget. Family-specific layouts connect the search state to the canvas, while one set of network weights serves four problem families. The FP32 network input occupies $786$\,kB across instance sizes. Our analysis bounds constraint coupling for spatially coherent regions, gives a rank certificate for rounds with zero possible improvement, and bounds the coupling advantage attainable on an expander family. On the tested families and hardware, FOVEA trails the strongest graph encoder at $10^{4}$ variables and overtakes it near $1.5\times10^{4}$; the cost model provides an approximate crossover estimate. At larger sizes, where the graph-encoder baselines exceed device memory, FOVEA reduces the primal integral by $12$ to $16\%$ relative to the best runnable baselines. On the expander family, FOVEA performs comparably to random selection, with a coupling advantage close to one.

eess.IV