CMRINet: Joint Groupwise Registration and Segmentation for Cardiac Function Quantification from Cine-MRI

TL;DR

This paper introduces CMRINet, an end-to-end deep learning model that jointly performs groupwise registration and segmentation of cardiac cine-MRI images, improving accuracy and efficiency for cardiac function assessment.

Contribution

The study presents a novel anatomically-guided deep learning model that simultaneously estimates registration and segmentation, enhancing cardiac MRI analysis over separate methods.

Findings

Improved registration and segmentation accuracy compared to conventional methods.

Significantly reduced computation time.

Validated on a large dataset of 374 subjects.

Abstract

Accurate and efficient quantification of cardiac function is essential for the estimation of prognosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). One of the most commonly used metrics for evaluating cardiac pumping performance is left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). However, LVEF can be affected by factors such as inter-observer variability and varying pre-load and after-load conditions, which can reduce its reproducibility. Additionally, cardiac dysfunction may not always manifest as alterations in LVEF, such as in heart failure and cardiotoxicity diseases. An alternative measure that can provide a relatively load-independent quantitative assessment of myocardial contractility is myocardial strain and strain rate. By using LVEF in combination with myocardial strain, it is possible to obtain a thorough description of cardiac function. Automated estimation of LVEF and other volumetric measures from cine-MRI sequences can be achieved through segmentation models, while strain calculation requires the estimation of tissue displacement between sequential frames, which can be accomplished using registration models. These tasks are often performed separately, potentially limiting the assessment of cardiac function. To address this issue, in this study we propose an end-to-end deep learning (DL) model that jointly estimates groupwise (GW) registration and segmentation for cardiac cine-MRI images. The proposed anatomically-guided Deep GW network was trained and validated on a large dataset of 4-chamber view cine-MRI image series of 374 subjects. A quantitative comparison with conventional GW registration using elastix and two DL-based methods showed that the proposed model improved performance and substantially reduced computation time.