Detection and Classification of Myocardial Infarction Transmurality Using Cardiac MR Image Analysis and Machine Learning Algorithms

The presence of abnormalities when the left ventricle is deformed is related to the patients' prognosis after a first myocardial infarction. These deformations can be detected by performing a cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) study. Currently, late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) is considered to be the gold standard when performing CMR imaging. However, CMR with LGE overestimates infarct size and underestimates recovery of dysfunctional segments after myocardial infarction. Based on this statement, the objective is to detect, characterize, and quantify the extent of myocardial infarction in patients with cardiac pathologies, using parameters derived from CMR, in order to obtain greater precision in patients' recovery predictions than when only studying LGE images. For this purpose, we studied the infarct presence and extension from a total of 105 images from 35 patients, and calculated myocardium strain and torsion to characterize and quantify the affected tissue. A total of twenty-one parameters were selected to create predictive models. Moreover, we compared two feature extraction methods, and the performance of five machine learning algorithms. Results show that both temporal and strain parameters are the most relevant to detect and characterize the extent of myocardial infarction. The use of imaging techniques and machine learning algorithms have great potential and show promising results when it comes to detecting the presence and extent of myocardial infarction. The current study proposes a novel approach to detect, quantify, and characterize cardiac infarction by using strain and torsion parameters from different CMR images and different Machine Learning algorithms. This would potentially overcome LGE, the current state of the art technique, in estimating the extension of damaged tissue and enable an objective diagnosis and clinical decision.