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In this modern era, various cardiac diseases are very crucial as they cause a high mortality rate. Early detection of cardio vascular disease (CVD) is essential to prevent and control it. Diagnosis of cardiac disease is the process of analyzing the left and right ventricle cavities (LV, RV) and myocardium (MYO) from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. As deep learning architectures are becoming more mature, segmenting, and classifying cardiac MRI images using deep learning is gaining more attention. This work is aimed to identify five different cardiac disease subgroups namely NOR, MINF, DCM, HCM, and ARC by employing a new deep join attention model (DJAM) technique for segmenting LV, MYO, and RV regions separately. This method provides advancement as the joined attention model was combined with the pooling layers and the resultant is added to the convolution layers. The proposed region integrated deep residual network (RIDRN) is used to extract the features from the segmented images for classification. In this process, the features of LV, RV, and MYO are combined with a different combination. The advantage of doing this process is to get the overall features without leaving any single strip of features from the three regions. Hence, it shows a rise in performance accuracy. The random forest classification method is used to classify the underlying features for cardiac disease diagnosis. This proposed work is tested in the automated cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC) dataset and it perfects the state‐of‐art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In clinical applications of cardiac left ventricle (LV) segmentation, the segmented LV is desired to include the cavity, trabeculae, and papillary muscles, which form a convex shape. However, the intensities of trabeculae and papillary muscles are similar to myocardium. Consequently, segmentation algorithms may easily misclassify trabeculae and papillary muscles as myocardium. In this paper, we propose a level set method with a convexity preserving mechanism to ensure the convexity of the segmented LV. In the proposed level set method, the curvature of the level set contours is used to control their convexity, such that the level set contour is finally deformed as a convex shape. The experimental results and the comparison with other level set methods show the advantage of our method in terms of segmentation accuracy. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods using deep-learning, our method is able to achieve comparable segmentation accuracy without the need for training, while the deep-learning based method requires a large set of training data and high-quality manual segmentation. Therefore, our method can be conveniently used in situation where training data and their manual segmentation are not available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated analysis and differentiation of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's condition using MR images is clinically significant in dementic disorder. Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a fatal and common form of dementia that progressively affects the patients. Shape descriptors could better differentiate the morphological alterations of brain structures and aid in the development of prospective disease modifying therapies. Ventricle enlargement is considered as a significant biomarker in the AD diagnosis. In this work, a method has been proposed to differentiate MCI from the healthy normal and AD subjects using Laplace-Beltrami (LB) eigen value shape descriptors. Prior to this, Reaction Diffusion (RD) level set is used to segment the ventricles in MR images and the results are validated against the Ground Truth (GT). LB eigen values are infinite series of spectrum that describes the intrinsic geometry of objects. Most significant LB shape descriptors are identified and their performance is analysed using linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Results show that, the RD level set is able to segment the ventricles. The segmented ventricles are found to have high correlation with GT. The eigen values in the LB spectrum could show distinction in the feature space better than the geometric features. High accuracy is observed in the classification results of linear SVM. The proposed automated system is able to distinctly separate the MCI from normal and AD subjects. Thus this pipeline of work seems to be clinically significant in the automated analysis of dementic subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) or bleed within the cerebral ventricles is a common condition among very low birth weight pre-term neonates. The prognosis for these patients is worsened should they develop progressive ventricular dilatation, i.e., post-hemorrhagic ventricle dilatation (PHVD), which occurs in 10–30% of IVH patients. Accurate measurement of ventricular volume would be valuable information and could be used to predict PHVD and determine whether that specific patient with ventricular dilatation requires treatment. While the monitoring of PHVD in infants is typically done by repeated transfontanell 2D ultrasound (US) and not MRI, once the patient's fontanels have closed around 12–18 months of life, the follow-up patient scans are done by MRI. Manual segmentation of ventricles from MR images is still seen as a gold standard. However, it is extremely time- and labor-consuming, and it also has observer variability. This paper proposes an accurate multiphase geodesic level-set segmentation algorithm for the extraction of the cerebral ventricle system of pre-term PHVD neonates from 3D T1 weighted MR images. The proposed segmentation algorithm makes use of multi-region segmentation technique associated with spatial priors built from a multi-atlas registration scheme. The leave-one-out cross validation with 19 patients with mild enlargement of ventricles and 7 hydrocephalus patients shows that the proposed method is accurate, suggesting that the proposed approach could be potentially used for volumetric and morphological analysis of the ventricle system of IVH neonatal brains in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Segmenting the cardiac ventricles in magnetic resonance (MR) images is required for cardiac function assessment. Numerous segmentation methods have been developed and applied to MR ventriculography. Quantitative validation of these segmentation methods with ground truth is needed prior to clinical use, but requires manual delineation of hundreds of images. We applied a well-established method to this problem and rigorously validated the results. Methods: An automatic method based on active contours without edges was used for left and the right ventricle cavity segmentation. A large database of 1,920 MR images obtained from 59 patients who gave informed consent was evaluated. Two standard metrics were used for quantitative error measurement. Results: Segmentation results are comparable to previously reported values in the literature. Since different points in the cardiac cycle and different slice levels were used in this study, a detailed error analysis is possible. Better performance was obtained at end diastole than at end systole, and on mid-ventricular slices than apical slices. Localization of segmentation errors were highlighted through a study of their spatial distribution. Conclusions: Ventricular segmentation based on region-driven active contours provided satisfactory results in MRI, without the use of a priori knowledge. The study of error distribution allows identification of potential improvements in algorithm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• MRI is an imaging modality for diagnosing heart disease and analyzing heart function. • The size and shape of ventricles are important parameters for cardiac analysis. • Scanning of short-axis cardiac MR image sequences is based on 33 subjects. • Image segmentation is based on transfer learning and multi-scale discriminant Generative Adversarial Network (TLMDB GAN). • TLMDB GAN based on transfer learning and multi-scale discrimination has higher segmentation accuracy when compared with U-Net. Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) is an important imaging modality for diagnosing heart disease and analyzing heart function. The size and shape of the ventricle are important parameters for judging whether the heart is normal, and the ventricles in the MRI image is effectively segmented It is the key to obtain the ventricle size, shape and other parameters. Accurate segmentation of the entricle is the fundamental guarantee for the evaluation of cardiac function. However, in the heart image, the contrast between the ventricle area and the background area is not obvious, the boundary is blurred, and there is noise in most of the images. The accurate segmentation of the ventricle becomes a challenging problem. We performed scanning of short-axis cardiac MR image sequences based on 33 subjects. Each subject has 8 to 15 sequences, each pertaining to a 20-frame sequence. Based on the U-Net neural network structure, the high-resolution information directly transferred from the encoder to the same-height decoder through the connection operation can provide more refined features for segmentation, such as gradients. The MRI left ventricular image segmentation method based on transfer learning and multi-scale discriminant Generative Adversarial Network (TLMDB GAN) solves the problem of insufficient ventricular image data. According to the experimental results of TLMDB GAN and U-Net network on the data set, the Dice coefficients of TLMDB GAN segmentation of the inner cardiac wall and outer cardiac wall of the ventricle are 0.9399 and 0.9697, respectively, which are 0.01 higher than other methods. The Dice coefficients of U-Net segmentation of the inner cardiac wall and outer cardiac wall of the ventricle are 0.8829 and 0.9292, respectively; The experimental results show that the TLMDB GAN based on transfer learning and multi-scale discrimination significantly improves the segmentation accuracy when compared with the U-Net segmentation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alzheimers disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease most prevalent in the elderly. Distinguishing disease-related memory decline from normal age-related memory decline has been clinically difficult due to the subtlety of cognitive change during the preclinical stage of AD. In contrast, sensitive biomarkers derived from in vivo neuroimaging data could improve the early identification of AD. In this study, we employed a morphometric analysis in the hippocampus and lateral ventricle. A novel group-wise template-based segmentation algorithm was developed for ventricular segmentation. Further, surface multivariate tensor-based morphometry and radial distance on each surface point were computed. Using Hotellings T 2 test, we found significant morphometric differences in both hippocampus and lateral ventricle between stable and clinically declining subjects. The left hemisphere was more severely affected than the right during this early disease stage. Hippocampal and ventricular morphometry has significant potential as an imaging biomarker for onset prediction and early diagnosis of AD.