SPReCHD: Four-Chamber Semantic Parsing Network for Recognizing Fetal Congenital Heart Disease in Medical Metaverse

Insights

This study introduces SPReCHD, a novel network for fetal congenital heart disease (CHD) detection. SPReCHD significantly improves prenatal CHD recognition by accurately analyzing fetal heart structures from ultrasound images.

Area of Science:

  • Medical Imaging
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cardiology

Background:

  • Congenital heart disease (CHD) is a common congenital malformation requiring early detection.
  • Fetal echocardiography is crucial for CHD screening, but faces challenges like fetal movement and image artifacts, leading to low prenatal detection rates.
  • Accurate analysis of fetal cardiac structures is vital for timely diagnosis and intervention.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop an advanced deep learning model for improved fetal CHD recognition from ultrasound images.
  • To enhance the segmentation and localization of fetal four-chamber cardiac structures.
  • To increase the prenatal detection rate of fetal CHD.

Main Methods:

  • A multi-scale gated axial-transformer network (MSGATNet) was developed to capture semantic information from fetal four-chamber views.
  • The SPReCHD network integrates MSGATNet for segmenting and locating arbitrary four-chamber contours.
  • The model was trained and validated on ultrasound datasets to evaluate its performance in recognizing fetal CHD.

Main Results:

  • The SPReCHD network achieved high performance metrics on the test set: 95.92% precision, 94% recall, 95% accuracy, and 94.95% F1-score.
  • The proposed method effectively captures discriminative representations of the fetal heart, overcoming limitations of traditional methods.
  • Significant improvement in the prenatal detection rate of fetal CHD was demonstrated.

Conclusions:

  • The SPReCHD network, integrating MSGATNet, offers a robust solution for fetal CHD recognition in medical metaverse applications.
  • The model's ability to accurately segment and analyze fetal cardiac structures leads to a substantial increase in prenatal CHD detection.
  • This advancement holds promise for improving clinical management and outcomes for fetuses diagnosed with CHD.