Cardiac Chamber Segmentation Using Deep Learning on Magnetic Resonance Images from Patients Before and After Atrial Septal Occlusion Surgery

We propose a robust technique for segmenting magnetic resonance images of post-atrial septal occlusion intervention in the cardiac chamber. The technique can be used to determine the surgical outcomes of atrial septal defects before and after implantation of a septal occluder, which intends to provide volume restoration of the right and left atria. A variant of the U-Net architecture is used to perform atrial segmentation via a deep convolutional neural network. The method was evaluated on a dataset containing 550 two-dimensional image slices, outperforming conventional active contouring regarding the Dice similarity coefficient, Jaccard index, and Hausdorff distance, and achieving segmentation in the presence of ghost artifacts that occlude the atrium outline. Moreover, the proposed technique is closer to manual segmentation than the snakes active contour model. After segmentation, we computed the volume ratio of right to left atria, obtaining a smaller ratio that indicates better restoration. Hence, the proposed technique allows to evaluate the surgical success of atrial septal occlusion and may support diagnosis regarding the accurate evaluation of atrial septal defects before and after occlusion procedures.