Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2507.05783

From Motion to Meaning: Biomechanics-Informed Neural Network for Explainable Cardiovascular Disease Identification

Abstract

Cardiac diseases are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, which requires accurate and timely diagnostic strategies. In this study, we introduce an innovative approach that combines deep learning image registration with physics-informed regularization to predict the biomechanical properties of moving cardiac tissues and extract features for disease classification. We utilize the energy strain formulation of Neo-Hookean material to model cardiac tissue deformations, optimizing the deformation field while ensuring its physical and biomechanical coherence. This explainable approach not only improves image registration accuracy, but also provides insights into the underlying biomechanical processes of the cardiac tissues. Evaluation on the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset achieved Dice scores of 0.945 for the left ventricular cavity, 0.908 for the right ventricular cavity, and 0.905 for the myocardium. Subsequently, we estimate the local strains within the moving heart and extract a detailed set of features used for cardiovascular disease classification. We evaluated five classification algorithms, Logistic Regression, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Support Vector Classifier, Random Forest, and Nearest Neighbour, and identified the most relevant features using a feature selection algorithm. The best performing classifier obtained a classification accuracy of 98% in the training set and 100% in the test set of the ACDC dataset. By integrating explainable artificial intelligence, this method empowers clinicians with a transparent understanding of the model's predictions based on cardiac mechanics, while also significantly improving the accuracy and reliability of cardiac disease diagnosis, paving the way for more personalized and effective patient care.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Comte Valentin, Gemma Piella, Mario Ceresa, Miguel A. Gonzalez Ballester. 2025-07-08. From Motion to Meaning: Biomechanics-Informed Neural Network for Explainable Cardiovascular Disease Identification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05783

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

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Analysis of Regularized Learning in Banach Spaces for Linear-functional Data

This article delves into the study of the theory of regularized learning in Banach spaces for linear-functional data. It encompasses discussions on representer theorems, pseudo-approximation theorems, and convergence theorems. Regularized learning is designed to minimize regularized empirical risks over a Banach space. The empirical risks are calculated by utilizing training data and multi-loss functions. The input training data are composed of linear functionals in a predual space of the Banach space to capture discrete local information from multimodal data and multiscale models. Through the regularized learning, approximations of the exact solution to an unidentified or uncertain original problem are globally achieved. In the convergence theorems, the convergence of the approximate solutions to the exact solution is established through the utilization of the weak* topology of the Banach space. The theorems of regularized learning are utilized in the interpretation of classical machine learning, such as support vector machines and artificial neural networks.

cs.LG

On Minimal Depth in Neural Networks

Understanding the relationship between the depth of a neural network and its representational capacity is a central problem in deep learning theory. In this work, we develop a geometric framework to analyze the expressivity of ReLU networks with the notion of depth complexity for convex polytopes. The depth of a polytope recursively quantifies the number of alternating convex hull and Minkowski sum operations required to construct it. This geometric perspective serves as a rigorous tool for deriving depth lower bounds and understanding the structural limits of deep neural architectures. We establish lower and upper bounds on the depth of polytopes, as well as tight bounds for classical families. These results yield two main consequences. First, we provide a purely geometric proof of the expressivity bound by Arora et al. (2018), confirming that $\lceil \log_2(n+1)\rceil$ hidden layers suffice to represent any continuous piecewise linear (CPWL) function. Second, we prove that, unlike general ReLU networks, convex polytopes do not admit a universal depth bound. Specifically, the depth of cyclic polytopes in dimensions $n \geq 4$ grows unboundedly with the number of vertices. This result implies that Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) cannot represent all convex CPWL functions with a fixed depth, revealing a sharp separation in expressivity between ICNNs and standard ReLU networks.

cs.LG

ELEMENT: Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum Entropy

Reinforcement learning agents depend on reward signals whose density is rarely under the designer's control, and when such signals are absent, an agent must generate its own drive to explore. State entropy maximization offers a principled objective for this, but existing methods break down at scale in two ways: the intrinsic reward vanishes once a state has been visited, discouraging revisits to the very gateways that lead onward, and estimating entropy over millions of accumulated observations becomes computationally prohibitive. We address both with Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum Entropy (ELEMENT), a multiscale intrinsically motivated framework for reward-free exploration that transfers to downstream tasks. ELEMENT couples lifelong entropy maximization with a complementary episodic term acting on a faster timescale. For the episodic term, we derive average episodic state entropy, an intrinsic reward that is the exact minimizer of a tractable upper bound on the reward-decomposition objective; for the lifelong term, we propose a $k$NN graph-based estimator that keeps entropy tractable without forgetting. ELEMENT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art intrinsic reward baselines on state coverage and unsupervised pre-training. Videos, code, and supplementary material: https://sites.google.com/view/element-rl.

cs.LG