Echocardiography to Cardiac MRI View Transformation for Real-Time Blind Restoration

Echocardiography is the most widely used imaging to monitor cardiac functions, serving as the first line in early detection of myocardial ischemia and infarction. However, echocardiography often suffers from several artifacts including sensor noise, lack of contrast, severe saturation, and missing myocardial segments which severely limit its usage in clinical diagnosis. In recent years, several machine learning methods have been proposed to improve echocardiography views. Yet, these methods usually address only a specific problem (e.g. denoising) and thus cannot provide a robust and reliable restoration in general. On the other hand, cardiac MRI provides a clean view of the heart without suffering such severe issues. However, due to its significantly higher cost, it is often only afforded by a few major hospitals, hence hindering its use and accessibility. In this pilot study, we propose a novel approach to transform echocardiography into the cardiac MRI view. For this purpose, Echo2MRI dataset, consisting of echocardiography and real cardiac MRI image pairs, is composed and will be shared publicly. A dedicated Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Network (Cycle-GAN) is trained to learn the transformation from echocardiography frames to cardiac MRI views. An extensive set of qualitative evaluations shows that the proposed transformer can synthesize high-quality artifact-free synthetic cardiac MRI views from a given sequence of echocardiography frames. Medical evaluations performed by a group of cardiologists further demonstrate that synthetic MRI views are indistinguishable from their original counterparts and are preferred over their initial sequence of echocardiography frames for diagnosis in 78.9% of the cases.

SAF-Net: Self-Attention Fusion Network for Myocardial Infarction Detection using Multi-View Echocardiography

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a severe case of coronary artery disease (CAD) and ultimately, its detection is substantial to prevent progressive damage to the myocardium. In this study, we propose a novel view-fusion model named self-attention fusion network (SAF-Net) to detect MI from multi-view echocardiography recordings. The proposed framework utilizes apical 2-chamber (A2C) and apical 4-chamber (A4C) view echocardiography recordings for classification. Three reference frames are extracted from each recording of both views and deployed pre-trained deep networks to extract highly representative features. The SAF-Net model utilizes a self-attention mechanism to learn dependencies in extracted feature vectors. The proposed model is computationally efficient thanks to its compact architecture having three main parts: a feature embedding to reduce dimensionality, self-attention for view-pooling, and dense layers for the classification. Experimental evaluation is performed using the HMC-QU-TAU dataset which consists of 160 patients with A2C and A4C view echocardiography recordings. The proposed SAF-Net model achieves a high-performance level with 88.26% precision, 77.64% sensitivity, and 78.13% accuracy. The results demonstrate that the SAF-Net model achieves the most accurate MI detection over multi-view echocardiography recordings.