AI approach to biventricular function assessment in cine-MRI: an ultra-small training dataset and multivendor study

Objective. It was a great challenge to train an excellent and generalized model on an ultra-small data set composed of multi-orientation cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. We try to develop a 3D deep learning method based on an ultra-small training data set from muti-orientation cine MRI images and assess its performance of automated biventricular structure segmentation and function assessment in multivendor. Approach. We completed the training and testing of our deep learning networks using only heart datasets of 150 cases (90 cases for training and 60 cases for testing). This datasets were obtained from three different MRI vendors and each subject included two phases of the cardiac cycle and three cine sequences. A 3D deep learning algorithm combining Transformers and U-Net was trained. The performance of the segmentation was evaluated using the Dice metric and Hausdorff distance (HD). Based on this, the manual and automatic results of cardiac function parameters were compared with Pearson correlation, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland-Altman analysis in multivendor. Main results. The results show that the average Dice of 0.92, 0.92, 0.94 and HD95 of 2.50, 1.36, 1.37 for three sequences. The automatic and manual results of seven parameters were excellently correlated with the lowest r2 value of 0.824 and the highest of 0.983. The ICC (0.908-0.989, P < 0.001) showed that the results were highly consistent. Bland-Altman with a 95% limit of agreement showed there was no significant difference except for the difference in RVESV (P = 0.005) and LVM (P < 0.001). Significance. The model had high accuracy in segmentation and excellent correlation and consistency in function assessment. It provides a fast and effective method for studying cardiac MRI and heart disease.