Leveraging Comprehensive Echo Data to Power Artificial Intelligence Models for Handheld Cardiac Ultrasound

To develop a fully end-to-end deep learning framework capable of estimating left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), estimating patient age, and classifying patient sex from echocardiographic videos, including videos collected using handheld cardiac ultrasound (HCU).

Deep learning models were trained using retrospective transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) data collected in Mayo Clinic Rochester and surrounding Mayo Clinic Health System sites (training: 6432 studies and internal validation: 1369 studies). Models were then evaluated using retrospective TTE data from the 3 Mayo Clinic sites (Rochester, n=1970; Arizona, n=1367; Florida, n=1562) before being applied to a prospective dataset of handheld ultrasound and TTE videos collected from 625 patients. Study data were collected between January 1, 2018 and February 29, 2024.

Models showed strong performance on the retrospective TTE datasets (LVEF regression: root mean squared error (RMSE)=6.83%, 6.53%, and 6.95% for Rochester, Arizona, and Florida cohorts, respectively; classification of LVEF ≤40% versus LVEF > 40%: area under curve (AUC)=0.962, 0.967, and 0.980 for Rochester, Arizona, and Florida, respectively; age: RMSE=9.44% for Rochester; sex: AUC=0.882 for Rochester), and performed comparably for prospective HCU versus TTE data (LVEF regression: RMSE=6.37% for HCU vs 5.57% for TTE; LVEF classification: AUC=0.974 vs 0.981; age: RMSE=10.35% vs 9.32%; sex: AUC=0.896 vs 0.933).

Robust TTE datasets can be used to effectively power HCU deep learning models, which in turn demonstrates focused diagnostic images can be obtained with handheld devices.