Automated Left Ventricle Ischemic Scar Detection in CT Using Deep Neural Networks

Hugh O'Brien; John Whitaker; Baldeep Singh Sidhu; Justin Gould; Tanja Kurzendorfer; Mark D O'Neill; Ronak Rajani; Karine Grigoryan; Christopher Aldo Rinaldi; Jonathan Taylor; Kawal Rhode; Peter Mountney; Steven Niederer

doi:10.3389/fcvm.2021.655252

Automated Left Ventricle Ischemic Scar Detection in CT Using Deep Neural Networks

Front Cardiovasc Med. 2021 Jul 2:8:655252. doi: 10.3389/fcvm.2021.655252. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Hugh O'Brien¹, John Whitaker^{1

2}, Baldeep Singh Sidhu^{1

2}, Justin Gould^{1

2}, Tanja Kurzendorfer³, Mark D O'Neill^{1

2}, Ronak Rajani^{1

2}, Karine Grigoryan², Christopher Aldo Rinaldi^{1

2}, Jonathan Taylor⁴, Kawal Rhode¹, Peter Mountney⁵, Steven Niederer¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
² Department of Cardiology, Guy's and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom.
³ Siemens Healthineers, Forchheim, Germany.
⁴ 3DLab, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
⁵ Siemens Healthineers, Medical Imaging Technologies, Princeton, NJ, United States.

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this study is to develop a scar detection method for routine computed tomography angiography (CTA) imaging using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), which relies solely on anatomical information as input and is compatible with existing clinical workflows. Background: Identifying cardiac patients with scar tissue is important for assisting diagnosis and guiding interventions. Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the gold standard for scar imaging; however, there are common instances where it is contraindicated. CTA is an alternative imaging modality that has fewer contraindications and is faster than Cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging but is unable to reliably image scar. Methods: A dataset of LGE MRI (200 patients, 83 with scar) was used to train and validate a CNN to detect ischemic scar slices using segmentation masks as input to the network. MRIs were segmented to produce 3D left ventricle meshes, which were sampled at points along the short axis to extract anatomical masks, with scar labels from LGE as ground truth. The trained CNN was tested with an independent CTA dataset (25 patients, with ground truth established with paired LGE MRI). Automated segmentation was performed to provide the same input format of anatomical masks for the network. The CNN was compared against manual reading of the CTA dataset by 3 experts. Results: Note that 84.7% cross-validated accuracy (AUC: 0.896) for detecting scar slices in the left ventricle on the MRI data was achieved. The trained network was tested against the CTA-derived data, with no further training, where it achieved an 88.3% accuracy (AUC: 0.901). The automated pipeline outperformed the manual reading by clinicians. Conclusion: Automatic ischemic scar detection can be performed from a routine cardiac CTA, without any scar-specific imaging or contrast agents. This requires only a single acquisition in the cardiac cycle. In a clinical setting, with near zero additional cost, scar presence could be detected to triage images, reduce reading times, and guide clinical decision-making.

Keywords: automated classification; computed tomography angiography; convolutional neural network; deep learning; fibrosis; left ventricle.