High Throughput Computation of Reference Ranges of Biventricular Cardiac Function on the UK Biobank Population Cohort

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully automatic high throughput workflow for analyzing cardiac MRI images, providing reference ranges for ventricular function in the UK Biobank population, with high accuracy and no user intervention.

Contribution

It presents the first fully automatic 3D analysis pipeline for UK Biobank cardiac data, enabling large-scale functional index computation without manual input.

Findings

High agreement between automatic and manual functional indexes.

Successful processing of 800 healthy subjects.

First to provide reference ranges for all key cardiac indexes in UKB.

Abstract

The exploitation of large-scale population data has the potential to improve healthcare by discovering and understanding patterns and trends within this data. To enable high throughput analysis of cardiac imaging data automatically, a pipeline should comprise quality monitoring of the input images, segmentation of the cardiac structures, assessment of the segmentation quality, and parsing of cardiac functional indexes. We present a fully automatic, high throughput image parsing workflow for the analysis of cardiac MR images, and test its performance on the UK Biobank (UKB) cardiac dataset. The proposed pipeline is capable of performing end-to-end image processing including: data organisation, image quality assessment, shape model initialisation, segmentation, segmentation quality assessment, and functional parameter computation; all without any user interaction. To the best of our knowledge,this is the first paper tackling the fully automatic 3D analysis of the UKB population study, providing reference ranges for all key cardiovascular functional indexes, from both left and right ventricles of the heart. We tested our workflow on a reference cohort of 800 healthy subjects for which manual delineations, and reference functional indexes exist. Our results show statistically significant agreement between the manually obtained reference indexes, and those automatically computed using our framework.