Xsens MTw Awinda
January 1, 2023
Eko
January 1, 2023Article of the Month – January 2023
Deep Learning Interpretations of Echocardiograms
Background
As a leading cause of death, cardiovascular disease is detrimental to one’s health and can shorten life expectancy in both genders. Although, with the use of echocardiography, researchers are hopeful to catch this disease in asymptomatic patients. The most common imaging within cardiovascular medicine is echocardiography. Echocardiography entails an ultrasound placed over the heart to obtain spatial resolution and high temporal images. Furthermore, this technology allows for the detection of cardiovascular diseases that doctors would not necessarily be able to detect on their own.
Methods
We present the results for two models that discuss the interpretation of systemic phenotypes and ventricular size and function. Using these echocardiogram images, researchers were able to evaluate model performance. To gather the most information, separate models with subsets of data images of one cardiac view were used.
Results
Using more than 2.6 million echocardiogram images, the identification of cardiac structures, functions, and systemic factors was achieved. Additionally, the models provided high prediction accuracy for challenging tasks for human evaluation. Interpretation analysis concludes that EchoNet portrays relevance to key cardiac structures. Overall, this study allowed advancement in cardiovascular risk stratification.
Conclusions and Relevance
EchoNet performance made a huge improvement through the efforts to augment data size, homogenize input data, and optimize model training with hyperparameter search. Echocardiography can visualize images of cardiac structures through almost any orientation. Therefore, echocardiography can detect cardiac function, which is crucial to saving many lives.
Relevance to Healthcare Field
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Echocardiography is a valuable tool that detects cardiac dysfunction and can predict cardiovascular disease. Although doctors can catch some cases with physical examination and other methods, echocardiography can find abnormalities in asymptomatic patients that cannot be seen otherwise. Not only does this device have a high prediction accuracy rate, but it can predict systemic phenotypes from only images of the heart. By and large, echocardiography provides better cardiovascular risk stratification and allows cardiologists to diagnose pathologies and prevent further cardiac damage.