Spatio-Temporal Deep Learning-Based Segmentation of Left Ventricular Wall in Murine Model Echocardiography
摘要
Accurate segmentation of the left ventricular wall in echocardiography of murine models is crucial for cardiac functional assessment, but it presents a challenge due to anatomical variability, low resolution and the effort required in manual annotation. This work proposes a modular automatic segmentation architecture composed of two modules: the Res-SE-U-Net, which is based on U-Net architecture and incorporates a ResNet18 encoder and Squeeze-and-Excitation attentional blocks to extract spatial features, followed by a ConvLSTM module to refine the segmentations by incorporating temporal information. The model was trained and evaluated on a dataset of 452 long-axis echocardiography frames, with data augmentation applied during training, achieving competitive performance metrics, with an Intersection over Union score of 0.803 and a Dice coefficient of 0.889, which proved to be an efficient, reproducible and effective approach.