Learning to complete incomplete hearts for population analysis of cardiac MR images

Cardiac MR acquisition with complete coverage from base to apex is required to ensure accurate subsequent analyses, such as volumetric and functional measurements. However, this requirement cannot be guaranteed when acquiring images in the presence of motion induced by cardiac muscle contraction and respiration. To address this problem, we propose an effective two-stage pipeline for detecting and synthesising absent slices in both the apical and basal region. The detection model comprises several dense blocks containing convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) layers, to leverage through-plane contextual and sequential ordering information of slices in cine MR data and achieve reliable classification results. The imputation network is based on a dedicated conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) that helps retain key visual cues and fine structural details in the synthesised image slices. The proposed network can infer multiple missing slices that are anatomically plausible and lead to improved accuracy of subsequent analyses on cardiac MRIs, e.g., ventricle segmentation, cardiac quantification compared to those derived from incomplete cardiac MR datasets. For instance, the results obtained when compensating for the absence of two basal slices show that the mean differences to the reference of stroke volume and ejection fraction are only -1.3 mL and -1.0%, respectively, which are significantly smaller than those calculated from the incomplete data (-26.8 mL and -6.7%). The proposed approach can improve the reliability of high-throughput image analysis in large-scale population studies, minimising the need for re-scanning patients or discarding incomplete acquisitions.