K-Net: Integrate Left Ventricle Segmentation and Direct Quantification of Paired Echo Sequence
Résumé
The integration of segmentation and direct quantification on the left ventricle (LV) from the paired apical views(i.e., apical 4-chamber and 2-chamber together) echo sequence clinically achieves the comprehensive cardiac assessment multiview segmentation for anatomical morphology, and multidimensional quantification for contractile function. Direct quantification of LV, i.e., to automatically quantify multiple LV indices directly from the image via task-aware feature representation and regression, avoids accumulative error from the inter-step target. This integration sequentially makes a stereoscopical reflection of cardiac activity jointly from the paired orthogonal cross views sequences, overcoming limited observation with a single plane. We propose a K-shaped Unified Network (K-Net), the first end-to-end framework to simultaneously segment LV from apical 4-chamber and 2-chamber views, and directly quantify LV from major- and minor-axis dimensions (1D), area (2D), and volume (3D), in sequence. It works via four components 1) the K-Net architecture with the Attention Junction enables heterogeneous tasks learning of segmentation task of pixel-wise classification, and direct quantification task of image-wise regression, by interactively introducing the information from segmentation to jointly promote spatial attention map to guide quantification focusing on LV-related region, and transferring quantification feedback to make global constraint on segmentation; 2) the Bi-ResLSTMs distributed in K-Net layer-by-layer hierarchically extract spatial-temporal information in echo sequence, with bidirectional recurrent and short-cut connection to model spatial-temporal information among all frames; 3) the Information Valve tailing the Bi-ResLSTMs selectively exchanges information among multiple views, by stimulating complementary information and suppressing redundant information to make the efficient cross-flow for each view; 4) the Evolution Loss comprehensively guides sequential data learning, with static constraint for frame values, and dynamic constraint for inter-frame value changes. The experiments show that our K-Net gains high performance with a Dice coefficient up to 91.44% and a mean absolute error of the major-axis dimension down to 2.74mm, which reveal its clinical potential.