Automated Evaluation for Pericardial Effusion and Cardiac Tamponade with Echocardiographic Artificial Intelligence

Timely and accurate detection of pericardial effusion and assessment cardiac tamponade remain challenging and highly operator dependent.

Artificial intelligence has advanced many echocardiographic assessments, and we aimed to develop and validate a deep learning model to automate the assessment of pericardial effusion severity and cardiac tamponade from echocardiogram videos.

We developed a deep learning model (EchoNet-Pericardium) using temporal-spatial convolutional neural networks to automate pericardial effusion severity grading and tamponade detection from echocardiography videos. The model was trained using a retrospective dataset of 1,427,660 videos from 85,380 echocardiograms at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (CSMC) to predict PE severity and cardiac tamponade across individual echocardiographic views and an ensemble approach combining predictions from five standard views. External validation was performed on 33,310 videos from 1,806 echocardiograms from Stanford Healthcare (SHC).

In the held out CSMC test set, EchoNet-Pericardium achieved an AUC of 0.900 (95% CI: 0.884-0.916) for detecting moderate or larger pericardial effusion, 0.942 (95% CI: 0.917-0.964) for large pericardial effusion, and 0.955 (95% CI: 0.939-0.968) for cardiac tamponade. In the SHC external validation cohort, the model achieved AUCs of 0.869 (95% CI: 0.794-0.933) for moderate or larger pericardial effusion, 0.959 (95% CI: 0.945-0.972) for large pericardial effusion, and 0.966 (95% CI: 0.906-0.995) for cardiac tamponade. Subgroup analysis demonstrated consistent performance across ages, sexes, left ventricular ejection fraction, and atrial fibrillation statuses.

Our deep learning-based framework accurately grades pericardial effusion severity and detects cardiac tamponade from echocardiograms, demonstrating consistent performance and generalizability across different cohorts. This automated tool has the potential to enhance clinical decision-making by reducing operator dependence and expediting diagnosis.