High-dimensional multimodal uncertainty estimation by manifold alignment:Application to 3D right ventricular strain computations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a manifold alignment-based method to estimate local uncertainties in high-dimensional physiological data, specifically myocardial deformation from 3D echocardiography, enhancing confidence in machine learning clinical applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel representation learning strategy that aligns different high-dimensional descriptors and estimates their local uncertainties, addressing data uncertainty challenges in medical imaging.

Findings

Quantifies local uncertainties in myocardial deformation from echocardiography data.

Demonstrates the method's ability to handle heterogeneous high-dimensional descriptors.

Shows potential for generalization to other population analysis tasks.

Abstract

Confidence in the results is a key ingredient to improve the adoption of machine learning methods by clinicians. Uncertainties on the results have been considered in the literature, but mostly those originating from the learning and processing methods. Uncertainty on the data is hardly challenged, as a single sample is often considered representative enough of each subject included in the analysis. In this paper, we propose a representation learning strategy to estimate local uncertainties on a physiological descriptor (here, myocardial deformation) previously obtained from medical images by different definitions or computations. We first use manifold alignment to match the latent representations associated to different high-dimensional input descriptors. Then, we formulate plausible distributions of latent uncertainties, and finally exploit them to reconstruct uncertainties on the input high-dimensional descriptors. We demonstrate its relevance for the quantification of myocardial deformation (strain) from 3D echocardiographic image sequences of the right ventricle, for which a lack of consensus exists in its definition and which directional component to use. We used a database of 100 control subjects with right ventricle overload, for which different types of strain are available at each point of the right ventricle endocardial surface mesh. Our approach quantifies local uncertainties on myocardial deformation from different descriptors defining this physiological concept. Such uncertainties cannot be directly estimated by local statistics on such descriptors, potentially of heterogeneous types. Beyond this controlled illustrative application, our methodology has the potential to be generalized to many other population analyses considering heterogeneous high-dimensional descriptors.