Segmentation of Late Gadolinium-Enhanced Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images Based on Residual Attention Mechanisms

Zhaokai Kong1, zhenyin fu2, Yingyi Geng1, Ling Xia1, ruiqing dong3, Jucheng Zhang4, Dongdong Deng5
1Zhejiang University, 2浙江大学, 3The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, 4The Second Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University School of Medicine, 5Dalian University of Technology


Abstract

Background: Accurate automated segmentation of late gadolinium-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance (LGE-CMR) images is crucial for personalized cardiac modeling, particularly for myocardial boundaries. This study aims to validate the accuracy of our proposed deep learning segmentation method for the left ventricular blood cavity (LV) and left ventricular myocardium (Myo). Methods: We analyzed LGE-CMR images from 150 patients (100 from EMIDEC, 5 from Anzhen Hospital, and 45 from MS-CMRseg2019). We propose a residual attention-based nnUNetv2 to automatically segment the LV and Myo. The residual attention mechanism enables the network to focus on more informative channels, enhancing discriminative learning and increasing the network's ability to segment the LV and Myo boundary. We also propose an image interpolation method that interpolates the voxel spacing of the original image and increases the number of image layers. Results: Our training and test set ratio was 7:3, with 105 patients in the training set and 45 patients in the test set. Our proposed method achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 85.19% for LV and 72.12% for Myo. The lower DSC score for Myo is primarily due to the poor image quality of the LGE-CMR. Our proposed image interpolation method smoothens the boundary of the network segmentation, facilitating subsequent work. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that our proposed residual attention-based nnUNetv2 network can effectively improve the network's ability to segment LV and Myo in LGE-CMR images.