Left ventricle segmentation in transesophageal echocardiography images using a deep neural network

Abstract

Purpose There has been little progress in research on the best anatomical position for effective chest compressions and cardiac function during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This study aimed to divide the left ventricle (LV) into segments to determine the best position for effective chest compressions using the LV systolic function seen during CPR. Methods We used transesophageal echocardiography images acquired during CPR. A deep neural network with an attention mechanism and a residual feature aggregation module were applied to the images to segment the LV. The results were compared between the proposed model and U-Net. Results The results of the proposed model showed higher performance in most metrics when compared to U-Net: dice coefficient (0.899±0.017 vs. 0.792±0.027, p<0.05); intersection of union (0.822±0.026 vs. 0.668±0.034, p<0.05); recall (0.904±0.023 vs. 0.757±0.037, p<0.05); precision (0.901±0.021 vs. 0.859±0.034, p>0.05). There was a significant difference between the proposed model and U-Net. Conclusion Compared to U-Net, the proposed model showed better performance for all metrics. This model would allow us to evaluate the systolic function of the heart during CPR in greater detail by segmenting the LV more accurately.