Automatic aorta and left ventricle segmentation for TAVI procedure planning using convolutional neural networks

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a minimally invasive procedure which is performed on patients with aortic valve defects that are posing a high-risk for conducting a surgical treatment. Preoperative surgical planning and valve sizing play a crucial role in reducing surgery complications and adverse effects such as paravalvular leakage or stroke. Planning process incorporates performing measurements, detecting landmarks and visualizing relevant structures in 3D. To automatize this process, a segmentation is required. Due to the lack of methods enabling parallel aorta and left ventricle segmentation we propose a fully automatic neural network approach based on 2D U-Net architecture. Convolutional neural network architecture was trained on 44 studies (22 raw CTA datasets and 22 elastic deformed scans) and tested on another 18 stacks of data. During every epoch of network learning process cross validation was performed on 8 stacks. As a result, we achieve 0.95 mean Dice coefficient score with standard deviation 0.02 determining high precision of predicted aorta and left ventricle label maps.