Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 11, 2025
Evaluation of Left Ventricular Structure and Function using 3D Echocardiography
Published on: October 28, 2020
SimLVSeg: Simplifying Left Ventricular Segmentation in 2-D+Time Echocardiograms With Self- and Weakly Supervised
Fadillah Maani1, Asim Ukaye1, Nada Saadi1
1Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Objective:
Achieving reliable automatic left ventricle (LV) segmentation from echocardiograms is challenging due to the inherent sparsity of annotations in the dataset, as clinicians typically only annotate two specific frames for diagnostic purposes. Here we aim to address this challenge by introducing simplified LV segmentation (SimLVSeg), a novel paradigm that enables video-based networks for consistent LV segmentation from sparsely annotated echocardiogram videos.
Methods:
SimLVSeg consists of two training stages: (i) self-supervised pre-training with temporal masking, which involves pre-training a video segmentation network by capturing the cyclic patterns of echocardiograms from largely unannotated echocardiogram frames, and (ii) weakly supervised learning tailored for LV segmentation from sparse annotations.
Results:
We extensively evaluated SimLVSeg using EchoNet-Dynamic, the largest echocardiography dataset. SimLVSeg outperformed state-of-the-art solutions by achieving a 93.32% (95% confidence interval: 93.21-93.43%) dice score while being more efficient. We further conducted an out-of-distribution test to showcase SimLVSeg's generalizability on distribution shifts (CAM US dataset).
Conclusion:
Our findings show that SimLVSeg exhibits excellent performance on LV segmentation with a relatively cheaper computational cost. This suggests that adopting video-based networks for LV segmentation is a promising research direction to achieve reliable LV segmentation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/SimLVSeg.
