Landmark Detection in Cardiac MRI by Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Purpose: To develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) solution for landmark detection in cardiac MRI (CMR). Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included cine, late gadolinium enhancement (LGE), and T1 mapping examinations from two hospitals. The training set included 2329 patients (34 089 images; mean age, 54.1 years; 1471 men; December 2017 to March 2020). A hold-out test set included 531 patients (7723 images; mean age, 51.5 years; 323 men; May 2020 to July 2020). CNN models were developed to detect two mitral valve plane and apical points on long-axis images. On short-axis images, anterior and posterior right ventricular (RV) insertion points and left ventricular (LV) center points were detected. Model outputs were compared with manual labels assigned by two readers. The trained model was deployed to MRI scanners. Results: For the long-axis images, successful detection of cardiac landmarks ranged from 99.7% to 100% for cine images and from 99.2% to 99.5% for LGE images. For the short-axis images, detection rates were 96.6% for cine, 97.6% for LGE, and 98.7% for T1 mapping. The Euclidean distances between model-assigned and manually assigned labels ranged from 2 to 3.5 mm for different landmarks, indicating close agreement between model-derived landmarks and manually assigned labels. For all views and imaging sequences, no differences between the models' assessment of images and the readers' assessment of images were found for the anterior RV insertion angle or LV length. Model inference for a typical cardiac cine series took 610 msec with the graphics processing unit and 5.6 seconds with central processing unit. Conclusion: A CNN was developed for landmark detection on both long- and short-axis CMR images acquired with cine, LGE, and T1 mapping sequences, and the accuracy of the CNN was comparable with the interreader variation. Supplemental material is available for this article.

Automated summary

A convolutional neural network (CNN) solution was developed for landmark detection in cardiac MRI images, achieving detection rates ranging from 99.2% to 100% for various types of images. The model showed close agreement with manually assigned labels and performed comparably to interreader variation.