Abstract
This paper proposes a fully-automated technique for estimation of an antenatal risk score for Coarctation of the Aorta (CoA) from fetal T2-weighted 3D cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR). Our framework combines automated multi-class fetal cardiac vessel segmentation based on two fully-labelled atlases (control and CoA) with statistical shape analysis of the fetal arch. The segmentation framework is weakly-supervised, requiring only condition-specific atlas labels which are propagated to training subjects. The proposed shape analysis method utilizes the predicted segmentation to extract a set of centerlines and radii capturing the shape of the fetal arch. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are then applied to derive a CoA risk score. The segmentation framework achieves a mean Dice of \(0.86 \pm 0.03\) for the aortic region. The CoA shape biomarker accurately discriminated between false positives (FP) and CoA cases (AUC 0.93) and showed good generalisability in an independent test set (AUC 0.87), achieving comparable performance to approaches using manual segmentations. Our proposed fully-automatic technique has the potential to improve the antenatal diagnosis of CoA from 3D fetal CMR data.
P. Ramirez and U. Hermida—The first two authors contributed equally.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge funding from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Smart Medical Imaging (EP/S022104/1).
We thank everyone who was involved in the acquisition and examination of the datasets and all participating mothers. This work was supported by the Rosetrees Trust [A2725], the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Medical Engineering at King’s College London [WT 203148/Z/16/Z], the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC IEH award [102431] for the iFIND project, the NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF) at Guy’s and St Thomas’ and by the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre based at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.
All fetal MRI datasets used in this work were processed subject to informed consent of the participants [REC: 07/H0707/105; REC: 14/LO/1806].
The work follows appropriate ethical standards in conducting research and writing the manuscript, following all applicable laws and regulations regarding treatment of animals or human subjects.
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Ramirez, P. et al. (2023). Towards Automatic Risk Prediction of Coarctation of the Aorta from Fetal CMR Using Atlas-Based Segmentation and Statistical Shape Modelling. In: Link-Sourani, D., Abaci Turk, E., Macgowan, C., Hutter, J., Melbourne, A., Licandro, R. (eds) Perinatal, Preterm and Paediatric Image Analysis. PIPPI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14246. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45544-5_5
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