Assessment of myocardial fibrosis using fusion models of echocardiographic radiomics and deep learning: Animal feasibility study
摘要
Cardiovascular disease remains the leading global cause of annually rising morbidity and mortality, with myocardial fibrosis implicated in nearly all cardiac pathologies. Because early fibrosis often presents as a subclinical condition, accurate diagnosis is essential for timely intervention and improved prognosis. We therefore developed and validated a hybrid radiomics-deep learning framework that fuses multi-scale echocardiographic information to accurately assess myocardial fibrosis severity.
MethodsMyocardial fibrosis was induced in rabbits using the two-kidney, one-clip method. We collected 2,498 echocardiographic images from control, mild-fibrosis, and severe-fibrosis cohorts, delineating regions of interest (ROI). A novel architecture combined a U-Net backbone with a Multi-Scale Channel Attention Module to capture local and global textures. Nine feature-selection methods and nine machine-learning classifiers were exhaustively compared using 10-fold cross-validation; the optimal pipeline was identified using performance metrics.
ResultsThe fusion model outperformed standalone radiomics and deep-learning models. The configuration-GINI-based feature selection, RF classification, and MS-CAM modulus།exhibited the best discriminative ability, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.979.
ConclusionsOur work provides a pioneering and accurate approach for assessing the severity of myocardial fibrosis.