Cardiac MR segmentation based on sequence propagation by deep learning

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 9;15(4):e0230415. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230415. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of myocardial in cardiac MRI (magnetic resonance image) is key to effective rapid diagnosis and quantitative pathology analysis. However, a low-quality CMR (cardiac magnetic resonance) image with a large amount of noise makes it extremely difficult to accurately and quickly manually segment the myocardial. In this paper, we propose a method for CMR segmentation based on U-Net and combined with image sequence information. The method can effectively segment from the top slice to the bottom slice of the CMR. During training, each input slice depends on the slice below it. In other words, the predicted segmentation result depends on the existing segmentation label of the previous slice. 3D sequence information is fully utilized. Our method was validated on the ACDC dataset, which included CMR images of 100 patients (1700 2D MRI). Experimental results show that our method can segment the myocardial quickly and efficiently and is better than the current state-of-the-art methods. When evaluating 340 CMR image, our model yielded an average dice score of 85.02 ± 0.15, which is much higher than the existing classical segmentation method(Unet, Dice score = 0.78 ± 0.3).

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Cardiac Imaging Techniques / methods*
  • Datasets as Topic
  • Deep Learning*
  • Heart / anatomy & histology
  • Heart / diagnostic imaging*
  • Heart Ventricles / anatomy & histology
  • Heart Ventricles / diagnostic imaging
  • Heart Ventricles / pathology
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional / methods
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • Myocardium / pathology
  • Neural Networks, Computer

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61602066), the Project of Sichuan Outstanding Young Scientific and Technological Talents (19JCQN0003), the major Project of Education Department in Sichuan (17ZA0063 and 2017JQ0030), and in part by the Natural Science Foundation for Young Scientists of CUIT (J201704) and the Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2019JDRC0077).