MCAL: an anatomical knowledge learning model for myocardial segmentation in 2D echocardiography
File(s)TUFFC-11452-2021.R1_Proof_hi.pdf (2.2 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Segmentation of the left ventricular (LV) myocardium in 2D echocardiography is essential for clinical decision making, especially in geometry measurement and index computation. However, segmenting the myocardium is a time-consuming process as well as challenging due to the fuzzy boundary caused by the low image quality. Previous methods based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) employ the ground-truth label as class associations on the pixel-level segmentation, or use label information to regulate the shape of predicted outputs, works limit for effective feature enhancement for 2D echocardiography. We propose a training strategy named multi-constrained aggregate learning (referred as MCAL), which leverages anatomical knowledge learned through ground-truth labels to infer segmented parts and discriminate boundary pixels. The new framework encourages the model to focus on the features in accordance with the learned anatomical representations, and the training objectives incorporate a Boundary Distance Transform Weight (BDTW) to enforce a higher weight value on the boundary region, which helps to improve the segmentation accuracy. The proposed method is built as an end-to-end framework with a top-down, bottom-up architecture with skip convolution fusion blocks, and carried out on two datasets (our dataset and the public CAMUS dataset). The comparison study shows that the proposed network outperforms the other segmentation baseline models, indicating that our method is beneficial for boundary pixels discrimination in segmentation.
Date Issued
2022-02-15
Date Acceptance
2022-02-11
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control, 2022, 69 (4), pp.1277-1287
ISSN
0885-3010
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
1277
End Page
1287
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control
Volume
69
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Sponsor
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9714298
Grant Number
MR/V023799/1
MC_PC_21013
Subjects
Echocardiography
Heart Ventricles
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Myocardium
Neural Networks, Computer
Myocardium
Heart Ventricles
Echocardiography
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Neural Networks, Computer
Acoustics
02 Physical Sciences
09 Engineering
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2022-02-15