Segmentation of Left Ventricle in 2D Echocardiography Using Deep Learning

The segmentation of Left Ventricle (LV) is currently carried out manually by the experts, and the automation of this process has proved challenging due to the presence of speckle noise and the inherently poor quality of the ultrasound images. This study aims to evaluate the performance of different state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) segmentation models to segment the LV endocardium in echocardiography images automatically. Those adopted methods include U-Net, SegNet, and fully convolutional DenseNets (FC-DenseNet). The prediction outputs of the models are used to assess the performance of the CNN models by comparing the automated results against the expert annotations (as the gold standard). Results reveal that the U-Net model outperforms other models by achieving an average Dice coefficient of 0.93 ± 0.04, and Hausdorff distance of 4.52 ± 0.90.