Multi-Views Fusion CNN for Left Ventricular Volumes Estimation on Cardiac MR Images

OBJECTIVE: Left ventricular (LV) volume estimation is a critical procedure for cardiac disease diagnosis. The objective of this paper is to address a direct LV volume prediction task. METHODS: In this paper, we propose a direct volume prediction method based on the end-to-end deep convolutional neural networks. We study the end-to-end LV volume prediction method in items of the data preprocessing, network structure, and multiview fusion strategy. The main contributions of this paper are the following aspects. First, we propose a new data preprocessing method on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR). Second, we propose a new network structure for end-to-end LV volume estimation. Third, we explore the representational capacity of different slices and propose a fusion strategy to improve the prediction accuracy. RESULTS: The evaluation results show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art LV volume estimation methods on the open accessible benchmark datasets. The clinical indexes derived from the predicted volumes agree well with the ground truth ( EDV:R^ 2=0.974, RMSE\,= 9.6\,ml; ESV:R^ 2=0.976, RMSE= 7.1\,ml; EF:R^ 2 =0.828, RMSE= 4.71%). CONCLUSION: Experimental results prove that the proposed method may be useful for the LV volume prediction task. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed method not only has application potential for cardiac diseases screening for large-scale CMR data, but also can be extended to other medical image research fields.