Artificial neural network: border detection in echocardiography

New Hybrid Method for Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction Assessment from Radionuclide Ventriculography Images

BACKGROUND

In this paper, we propose a new efficient method of radionuclide ventriculography image segmentation to estimate the left ventricular ejection fraction. This parameter is an important prognostic factor for diagnosing abnormal cardiac function.

METHODS

The proposed method combines the Chan-Vese and the mathematical morphology algorithms. It was applied to diastolic and systolic images obtained from the Nuclear Medicine Department of Salah AZAIEZ Institute. In order to validate our proposed method, we compare the obtained results to those of two methods present in the literature. The first one is based on mathematical morphology, while the second one uses the basic Chan-Vese algorithm. To evaluate the quality of segmentation, we compute accuracy, positive predictive value and area under the ROC curve. We also compare the left ventricle ejection fraction estimated by our method to that of the reference given by the software of the gamma-camera and validated by the expert, using Pearson's correlation coefficient, ANOVA test and linear regression.

RESULTS

Static results show that the proposed method is very efficient for the detection of the left ventricle. The accuracy was 98.60%, higher than that of the other two methods (95.52% and 98.50%).

CONCLUSION

Likewise, the positive predictive value was the highest (86.40% vs. 83.63% 71.82%). The area under the ROC curve was also the most important (0.998% vs. 0.926% 0.919%). On the other hand, Pearson's correlation coefficient was the highest (99% vs. 98% 37%). The correlation was significantly positive (p<0.001).

Image-based clustering and connected component labeling for rapid automated left and right ventricular endocardial volume extraction and segmentation in full cardiac cycle multi-frame MRI images of cardiac patients

A rapid method for left and right ventricular endocardial volume segmentation and clinical cardiac parameter calculation from MRI images of cardiac patients is presented. The clinical motivation is providing cardiologists a tool for assessing the cardiac function in a patient through the left ventricular endocardial volume's ejection fraction. A new method combining adapted fuzzy membership-based c-means pixel clustering and connected regions component labeling is used for automatic segmentation of the left and right ventricular endocardial volumes. This proposed pixel clustering with labeling approach avoids manual initialization or user intervention and does not require specifying the region of interest. This method fully automatically extracts the left and right ventricular endocardial volumes and avoids manual tracing on all MRI image frames in the complete cardiac cycle from systole to diastole. The average computational processing time per frame is 0.6 s, making it much more efficient than deformable methods, which need several iterations for the evolution of the snake or contour. Accuracy of the automated method presented herein was validated against manual tracing-based extraction, performed with the guidance of cardiac experts, on several MRI frames. Dice coefficients between the proposed automatic versus manual traced ventricular endocardial volume segmentations were observed to be 0.9781 ± 0.0070 (for left ventricular endocardial volume) and 0.9819 ± 0.0058 (for right ventricular endocardial volume), and the Pearson correlation coefficients were observed to be 0.9655 ± 0.0206 (for left ventricular endocardial volume) and 0.9870 ± 0.0131 (for right ventricular endocardial volume). Graphical abstract The left ventricular endocardial volume segmentation methodology illustrated as a series of algorithms.

Application of gene expression programming and neural networks to predict adverse events of radical hysterectomy in cervical cancer patients

The aim of this article was to compare gene expression programming (GEP) method with three types of neural networks in the prediction of adverse events of radical hysterectomy in cervical cancer patients. One-hundred and seven patients treated by radical hysterectomy were analyzed. Each record representing a single patient consisted of 10 parameters. The occurrence and lack of perioperative complications imposed a two-class classification problem. In the simulations, GEP algorithm was compared to a multilayer perceptron (MLP), a radial basis function network neural, and a probabilistic neural network. The generalization ability of the models was assessed on the basis of their accuracy, the sensitivity, the specificity, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). The GEP classifier provided best results in the prediction of the adverse events with the accuracy of 71.96 %. Comparable but slightly worse outcomes were obtained using MLP, i.e., 71.87 %. For each of measured indices: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and the AUROC, the standard deviation was the smallest for the models generated by GEP classifier.