[Development of a Deep Learning Model for Judging Late Gadolinium-enhancement in Cardiac MRI]

To verify the usefulness of a deep learning model for determining the presence or absence of contrast-enhanced myocardium in late gadolinium-enhancement images in cardiac MRI.

We used 174 late gadolinium-enhancement myocardial short-axis images obtained from contrast-enhanced cardiac MRI performed using a 3.0T MRI system at the University of Tokyo Hospital. Of these, 144 images were used for training, extracting a region of interest targeting the heart, scaling signal intensity, and data augmentation were performed to obtain 3312 training images. The interpretation report of two cardiology specialists of our hospital was used as the correct label. A learning model was constructed using a convolutional neural network and applied to 30 test data. In all cases, the acquired mean age was 56.4±12.1 years, and the male-to-female ratio was 1 : 0.82.

Before and after data augmentation, sensitivity remained consistent at 93.3%, specificity improved from 0.0% to 100.0%, and accuracy improved from 46.7% to 96.7%.

The prediction accuracy of the deep learning model developed in this research is high, suggesting its high usefulness.