Orientation-Robust Latent Motion Trajectory Learning for Annotation-free Cardiac Phase Detection in Fetal Echocardiography

TL;DR

This paper introduces ORBIT, a self-supervised method for automatic, orientation-robust detection of cardiac phases in fetal echocardiography, eliminating manual annotation and improving accuracy across diverse fetal positions.

Contribution

ORBIT is a novel self-supervised framework that learns latent cardiac motion trajectories to accurately identify cardiac phases without manual labels or fixed orientation assumptions.

Findings

Achieves low mean absolute error in phase detection for normal and CHD cases.

Outperforms existing annotation-free methods constrained by fixed orientations.

Demonstrates robustness across diverse fetal positions.

Abstract

Fetal echocardiography is essential for detecting congenital heart disease (CHD), facilitating pregnancy management, optimized delivery planning, and timely postnatal interventions. Among standard imaging planes, the four-chamber (4CH) view provides comprehensive information for CHD diagnosis, where clinicians carefully inspect the end-diastolic (ED) and end-systolic (ES) phases to evaluate cardiac structure and motion. Automated detection of these cardiac phases is thus a critical component toward fully automated CHD analysis. Yet, in the absence of fetal electrocardiography (ECG), manual identification of ED and ES frames remains a labor-intensive bottleneck. We present ORBIT (Orientation-Robust Beat Inference from Trajectories), a self-supervised framework that identifies cardiac phases without manual annotations under various fetal heart orientation. ORBIT employs registration as self-supervision task and learns a latent motion trajectory of cardiac deformation, whose turning points capture transitions between cardiac relaxation and contraction, enabling accurate and orientation-robust localization of ED and ES frames across diverse fetal positions. Trained exclusively on normal fetal echocardiography videos, ORBIT achieves consistent performance on both normal (MAE = 1.9 frames for ED and 1.6 for ES) and CHD cases (MAE = 2.4 frames for ED and 2.1 for ES), outperforming existing annotation-free approaches constrained by fixed orientation assumptions. These results highlight the potential of ORBIT to facilitate robust cardiac phase detection directly from 4CH fetal echocardiography.