Multi-frame Attention Network for Left Ventricle Segmentation in 3D Echocardiography

Echocardiography is one of the main imaging modalities used to assess the cardiovascular health of patients. Among the many analyses performed on echocardiography, segmentation of left ventricle is crucial to quantify the clinical measurements like ejection fraction. However, segmentation of left ventricle in 3D echocardiography remains a challenging and tedious task. In this paper, we propose a multi-frame attention network to improve the performance of segmentation of left ventricle in 3D echocardiography. The multi-frame attention mechanism allows highly correlated spatiotemporal features in a sequence of images that come after a target image to be used to augment the performance of segmentation. Experimental results shown on 51 in vivo porcine 3D+time echocardiography images show that utilizing correlated spatiotemporal features significantly improves the performance of left ventricle segmentation when compared to other standard deep learning-based medical image segmentation models.