IFT-Net: Interactive Fusion Transformer Network for Quantitative Analysis of Pediatric Echocardiography

Abstract

The task of automatic segmentation and measurement of key anatomical structures in echocardiography is critical for subsequent extraction of clinical parameters. However, the influence of boundary blur, speckle noise, and other factors increase the difficulty of fully automatically segmenting 2D ultrasound images. The previous research has addressed this challenge using convolutional neural networks (CNN), which fails to consider global contextual information and long-range dependency. To further improve the quantitative analysis of pediatric echocardiography, this paper proposes an interactive fusion transformer network (IFT-Net) for quantitative analysis of pediatric echocardiography, which achieves the bidirectional fusion between local features and global context information by constructing interactive learning between the convolution branch and the transformer branch. First, we construct a dual-attention pyramid transformer (DPT) branch to model the long-range dependency from spatial and channels and enhance the learning of global context information. Second, we design a bidirectional interactive fusion (BIF) unit that fuses the local and global features interactively, maximizes their preservation and refines the segmentation. Finally, we measure the clinical anatomical parameters through key point positioning. Based on the parasternal short-axis (PSAX) view of the heart base from pediatric echocardiography, we segment and quantify the right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT) and aorta (AO) with promising results, indicating the potential clinical application. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Zhaocheng1/IFT-Net.

Keywords: Bidirectional interactive fusion; Interactive fusion transformer network; Key point positioning; Pediatric echocardiography; Quantitative analysis.