EchoSegDiff: a diffusion-based model for left ventricular segmentation in echocardiography

Echocardiography is a primary tool for cardiac diagnosis. Accurate delineation of the left ventricle is a prerequisite for echocardiography-based clinical decision-making. In this work, we propose an echocardiographic left ventricular segmentation method based on the diffusion probability model, which is named EchoSegDiff. The EchoSegDiff takes an encoder-decoder structure in the reverse diffusion process. A diffusion encoder residual block (DEResblock) based on the atrous pyramid squeeze attention (APSA) block is coined as the main module of the encoder, so that the EchoSegDiff can catch multiscale features effectively. A novel feature fusion module (FFM) is further proposed, which can adaptively fuse the features from encoder and decoder to reduce semantic gap between encoder and decoder. The proposed EchoSegDiff is validated on two publicly available echocardiography datasets. In terms of left ventricular segmentation performance, it outperforms other state-of-the-art networks. The segmentation accuracy on the two datasets reached 93.69% and 89.95%, respectively. This demonstrates the excellent potential of EchoSegDiff in the task of left ventricular segmentation in echocardiography.