Deep Learning-Driven Innovations in Echocardiography: Taxonomy, Clinical Impact, Challenges, and Opportunities

Despite technological advancements in echocardiography (echo) systems, effectively utilizing these machines and achieving accurate and timely interpretation of the resulting image data still pose significant challenges. Hence, many researchers have sought to overcome these challenges by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through the application of deep learning (DL) techniques. In this study, we provide a thorough analysis of studies aimed at leveraging DL to reshape the field of echocardiography, with a focus on their clinical impact, challenges, and opportunities for advancement. These studies can be categorized into two main groups, each encompassing multiple tasks: data acquisition and quality enhancement, and intelligent echo data analysis. The latter group is the most extensively studied, with key tasks including annotated data generation, cardiac abnormality diagnosis, cardiac structure segmentation, etc. Through thorough analysis of the selected studies, we highlight the transformative impact of DL techniques on the automatic diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases, as well as the underexplored challenges and potential solutions and research tasks. Moreover, we introduce heart anatomy and important clinical parameters, thereby providing researchers of DL algorithms with clinical procedures associated with evaluating blood vessels and cardiac function. Furthermore, details of the commonly adopted deep learning models and their implementation procedures are presented. By providing a multidisciplinary perspective, we believe that our work paves the way for more collaborative efforts in the field and establishes a foundation for future innovations in DL-driven echocardiography.