EAGT: Echocardiography Augmentation for Generalisability and Transferability

Abstract

Deep learning models for echocardiography segmentation often struggle to generalise across institutions, scanners, and patient populations, where collecting large, consistently annotated datasets is infeasible. Data augmentation is inexpensive and widely used to improve the robustness of deep learning models; however, its role in enhancing cross-dataset generalisability in echocardiography remains insufficiently understood. This study presents a large-scale multi-dataset evaluation of 29 data augmentation techniques and their pairwise combinations for 2D left ventricular segmentation using a U-Net trained on Unity, CAMUS, and EchoNet Dynamic datasets. Each augmentation was explored under several hyperparameter settings and assessed through repeated runs using Dice and IoU in both in-domain and cross-dataset scenarios, with statistical significance quantified via independent t-tests. In-domain accuracy was near-saturated and insensitive to augmentation, whereas cross-dataset performance varied widely. Geometry-based augmentations including affine, shift-scale-rotate, flip, and perspective produced the largest and most consistent gains, while aggressive intensity- and artefact-based transforms often degraded transfer. Moreover, pairwise combinations outperformed individual augmentations mainly when the two transformations were complementary, particularly by improving some difficult domain-shift cases from poor to acceptable performance. These findings provide empirical guidance for designing augmentation policies that improve the robustness and transferability of echocardiography segmentation models.