Hyuk-Jae Chang

Jaeik Jeon, Jiyeon Kim, Yeonggul Jang et al.

Doppler echocardiography offers critical insights into cardiac function and phases by quantifying blood flow velocities and evaluating myocardial motion. However, previous methods for automating Doppler analysis, ranging from initial signal processing techniques to advanced deep learning approaches, have been constrained by their reliance on electrocardiogram (ECG) data and their inability to process Doppler views collectively. We introduce a novel unified framework using a convolutional neural network for comprehensive analysis of spectral and tissue Doppler echocardiography images that combines automatic measurements and end-diastole (ED) detection into a singular method. The network automatically recognizes key features across various Doppler views, with novel Doppler shape embedding and anti-aliasing modules enhancing interpretation and ensuring consistent analysis. Empirical results indicate a consistent outperformance in performance metrics, including dice similarity coefficients (DSC) and intersection over union (IoU). The proposed framework demonstrates strong agreement with clinicians in Doppler automatic measurements and competitive performance in ED detection.

Jina Lee, Youngtaek Hong, Dawun Jeong et al.

Radiomics, a medical imaging technique, extracts quantitative handcrafted features from images to predict diseases. Harmonization in those features ensures consistent feature extraction across various imaging devices and protocols. Methods for harmonization include standardized imaging protocols, statistical adjustments, and evaluating feature robustness. Myocardial diseases such as Left Ventricular Hypertrophy (LVH) and Hypertensive Heart Disease (HHD) are diagnosed via echocardiography, but variable imaging settings pose challenges. Harmonization techniques are crucial for applying handcrafted features in disease diagnosis in such scenario. Self-supervised learning (SSL) enhances data understanding within limited datasets and adapts to diverse data settings. ConvNeXt-V2 integrates convolutional layers into SSL, displaying superior performance in various tasks. This study focuses on convolutional filters within SSL, using them as preprocessing to convert images into feature maps for handcrafted feature harmonization. Our proposed method excelled in harmonization evaluation and exhibited superior LVH classification performance compared to existing methods.

Siming Yan, Feng Shi, Yuhua Chen et al.

Coronary calcium causes beam hardening and blooming artifacts on cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) images, which lead to overestimation of lumen stenosis and reduction of diagnostic specificity. To properly remove coronary calcification and restore arterial lumen precisely, we propose a machine learning-based method with a multi-step inpainting process. We developed a new network configuration, Dense-Unet, to achieve optimal performance with low computational cost. Results after the calcium removal process were validated by comparing with gold-standard X-ray angiography. Our results demonstrated that removing coronary calcification from images with the proposed approach was feasible, and may potentially improve the diagnostic accuracy of CTA.