Cardiac Copilot: Automatic Probe Guidance for Echocardiography with World Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces Cardiac Dreamer, a data-driven world model that guides less experienced sonographers in real-time probe positioning during echocardiography, aiming to improve diagnostic accuracy and healthcare access.

Contribution

The novel Cardiac Dreamer world model enables autonomous navigation in cardiac ultrasound, reducing errors and stabilizing probe guidance in real-world clinical data.

Findings

Reduced navigation errors by up to 33%

Achieved stable performance across standard cardiac planes

Trained on 110 clinical scans with 151K sample pairs

Abstract

Echocardiography is the only technique capable of real-time imaging of the heart and is vital for diagnosing the majority of cardiac diseases. However, there is a severe shortage of experienced cardiac sonographers, due to the heart's complex structure and significant operational challenges. To mitigate this situation, we present a Cardiac Copilot system capable of providing real-time probe movement guidance to assist less experienced sonographers in conducting freehand echocardiography. This system can enable non-experts, especially in primary departments and medically underserved areas, to perform cardiac ultrasound examinations, potentially improving global healthcare delivery. The core innovation lies in proposing a data-driven world model, named Cardiac Dreamer, for representing cardiac spatial structures. This world model can provide structure features of any cardiac planes around the current probe position in the latent space, serving as an precise navigation map for autonomous plane localization. We train our model with real-world ultrasound data and corresponding probe motion from 110 routine clinical scans with 151K sample pairs by three certified sonographers. Evaluations on three standard planes with 37K sample pairs demonstrate that the world model can reduce navigation errors by up to 33\% and exhibit more stable performance.