Cardiac MRI Semantic Segmentation for Ventricles and Myocardium using Deep Learning

Automated noninvasive cardiac diagnosis plays a critical role in the early detection of cardiac disorders and cost-effective clinical management. Automated diagnosis involves the automated segmentation and analysis of cardiac images. Precise delineation of cardiac substructures and extraction of their morphological attributes are essential for evaluating the cardiac function, and diagnosing cardiovascular disease such as cardiomyopathy, valvular diseases, abnormalities related to septum perforations, and blood-flow rate. Semantic segmentation labels the CMR image at the pixel level, and localizes its subcomponents to facilitate the detection of abnormalities, including abnormalities in cardiac wall motion in an aging heart with muscle abnormalities, vascular abnormalities, and valvular abnormalities. In this paper, we describe a model to improve semantic segmentation of CMR images. The model extracts edge-attributes and context information during down-sampling of the U-Net and infuses this information during up-sampling to localize three major cardiac structures: left ventricle cavity (LV); right ventricle cavity (RV); and LV myocardium (LMyo). We present an algorithm and performance results. A comparison of our model with previous leading models, using similarity metrics between actual image and segmented image, shows that our approach improves Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) by 2%-11% and lowers Hausdorff distance (HD) by 1.6 to 5.7 mm.