Cardiac phase detection in echocardiography using convolutional neural networks

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, no...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Moomal Farhad, Mohammad Mehedy Masud, Azam Beg, Amir Ahmad, Luai A. Ahmed, Sehar Memon
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2023-06-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36047-x
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2045-2322