Abstract

Motion estimation and segmentation are both critical steps in identifying and assessing myocardial dysfunction, but are traditionally treated as unique tasks and solved as separate steps. However, many motion estimation techniques rely on accurate segmentations. It has been demonstrated in the computer vision and medical image analysis literature that both these tasks may be mutually beneficial when solved simultaneously. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning network that can concurrently predict volumetric segmentations of the left ventricle and estimate motion between 3D echocardiographic image pairs. The model exploits complementary latent features between the two tasks using a shared feature encoder with task-specific decoding branches. Anatomically inspired constraints are incorporated to enforce realistic motion patterns. We evaluate our proposed model on an in vivo 3D echocardiographic canine dataset. Results suggest that coupling these two tasks in a learning framework performs favorably when compared against single task learning and other alternative methods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the following grants: R01 HL121226, R01 HL137365, and HL 098069. Additionally, we are grateful toward Drs. Nripesh Parajuli and Allen Lu and the Fellows and staff of the Yale Translational Research Imaging Center, especially Drs. Nabil Boutagy and Imran Al Khalil, for their technical support and assistance with the in vivo canine imaging studies.

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Ta, K., Ahn, S.S., Stendahl, J.C., Langdon, J., Sinusas, A.J., Duncan, J.S. (2022). Simultaneous Segmentation and Motion Estimation of Left Ventricular Myocardium in 3D Echocardiography Using Multi-task Learning. In: Puyol Antón, E., et al. Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart. Multi-Disease, Multi-View, and Multi-Center Right Ventricular Segmentation in Cardiac MRI Challenge. STACOM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13131. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93722-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93722-5_14

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