Cardiac phase detection in echocardiography using convolutional neural networks.

Journal: Scientific reports
PMID:

Abstract

Echocardiography is a commonly used and cost-effective test to assess heart conditions. During the test, cardiologists and technicians observe two cardiac phases-end-systolic (ES) and end-diastolic (ED)-which are critical for calculating heart chamber size and ejection fraction. However, non-essential frames called Non-ESED frames may appear between these phases. Currently, technicians or cardiologists manually detect these phases, which is time-consuming and prone to errors. To address this, an automated and efficient technique is needed to accurately detect cardiac phases and minimize diagnostic errors. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model called DeepPhase to assist cardiology personnel. Our convolutional neural network (CNN) learns from echocardiography images to identify the ES, ED, and Non-ESED phases without the need for left ventricle segmentation or electrocardiograms. We evaluate our model on three echocardiography image datasets, including the CAMUS dataset, the EchoNet Dynamic dataset, and a new dataset we collected from a cardiac hospital (CardiacPhase). Our model outperforms existing techniques, achieving 0.96 and 0.82 area under the curve (AUC) on the CAMUS and CardiacPhase datasets, respectively. We also propose a novel cropping technique to enhance the model's performance and ensure its relevance to real-world scenarios for ES, ED, and Non ES-ED classification.

Authors

  • Moomal Farhad
    College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, P.O. Box 15551, United Arab Emirates.
  • Mohammad Mehedy Masud
    College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, P.O. Box 15551, United Arab Emirates. m.masud@uaeu.ac.ae.
  • Azam Beg
    College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, P.O. Box 15551, United Arab Emirates.
  • Amir Ahmad
    Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE.
  • Luai A Ahmed
    Zayed Centre for Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE.
  • Sehar Memon
    Indus Medical College, Hyderabad, Pakistan.