TY - GEN
T1 - 3D Attention M-net for Short-axis Left Ventricular Myocardium Segmentation in Mice MR cardiac Images
AU - Huang, Luojie
AU - Jin, Andrew
AU - Wei, Jinchi
AU - Tipre, Dnyanesh
AU - Liu, Chin Fu
AU - Weiss, Robert G.
AU - Ardekani, Siamak
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health (HL130292, HL61912, HL63030)
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Small rodent cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an important role in preclinical models of cardiac disease. Accurate myocardial boundaries delineation is crucial to most morphological and functional analysis in rodent cardiac MRIs. However, rodent cardiac MRIs, due to animal's small cardiac volume and high heart rate, are usually acquired with sub-optimal resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). These rodent cardiac MRIs can also suffer from signal loss due to the intra-voxel dephasing. These factors make automatic myocardial segmentation challenging. Manual contouring could be applied to label myocardial boundaries but it is usually laborious, time consuming, and not systematically objective. In this study, we present a deep learning approach based on 3D attention M-net to perform automatic segmentation of left ventricular myocardium. In the deep learning architecture, we use dual spatial-channel attention gates between encoder and decoder along with multi-scale feature fusion path after decoder. Attention gates enable networks to focus on relevant spatial information and channel features to improve segmentation performance. A distance derived loss term, besides general dice loss and binary cross entropy loss, was also introduced to our hybrid loss functions to refine segmentation contours. The proposed model outperforms other generic models, like U-Net and FCN, in major segmentation metrics including the dice score (0.9072), Jaccard index (0.8307) and Hausdorff distance (3.1754 pixels), which are comparable to the results achieved by state-of-the-art models on human cardiac ACDC17 datasets.Clinical relevance Small rodent cardiac MRI is routinely used to probe the effect of individual genes or groups of genes on the etiology of a large number of cardiovascular diseases. An automatic myocardium segmentation algorithm specifically designed for these data can enhance accuracy and reproducibility of cardiac structure and function analysis.
AB - Small rodent cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an important role in preclinical models of cardiac disease. Accurate myocardial boundaries delineation is crucial to most morphological and functional analysis in rodent cardiac MRIs. However, rodent cardiac MRIs, due to animal's small cardiac volume and high heart rate, are usually acquired with sub-optimal resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). These rodent cardiac MRIs can also suffer from signal loss due to the intra-voxel dephasing. These factors make automatic myocardial segmentation challenging. Manual contouring could be applied to label myocardial boundaries but it is usually laborious, time consuming, and not systematically objective. In this study, we present a deep learning approach based on 3D attention M-net to perform automatic segmentation of left ventricular myocardium. In the deep learning architecture, we use dual spatial-channel attention gates between encoder and decoder along with multi-scale feature fusion path after decoder. Attention gates enable networks to focus on relevant spatial information and channel features to improve segmentation performance. A distance derived loss term, besides general dice loss and binary cross entropy loss, was also introduced to our hybrid loss functions to refine segmentation contours. The proposed model outperforms other generic models, like U-Net and FCN, in major segmentation metrics including the dice score (0.9072), Jaccard index (0.8307) and Hausdorff distance (3.1754 pixels), which are comparable to the results achieved by state-of-the-art models on human cardiac ACDC17 datasets.Clinical relevance Small rodent cardiac MRI is routinely used to probe the effect of individual genes or groups of genes on the etiology of a large number of cardiovascular diseases. An automatic myocardium segmentation algorithm specifically designed for these data can enhance accuracy and reproducibility of cardiac structure and function analysis.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122503731&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85122503731&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630335
DO - 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630335
M3 - Conference contribution
C2 - 34891958
AN - SCOPUS:85122503731
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS
SP - 3353
EP - 3357
BT - 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2021
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2021
Y2 - 1 November 2021 through 5 November 2021
ER -