Yiqun Lin

Jiewen Yang, Yiqun Lin, Bin Pu et al.

Echocardiogram video plays a crucial role in analysing cardiac function and diagnosing cardiac diseases. Current deep neural network methods primarily aim to enhance diagnosis accuracy by incorporating prior knowledge, such as segmenting cardiac structures or lesions annotated by human experts. However, diagnosing the inconsistent behaviours of the heart, which exist across both spatial and temporal dimensions, remains extremely challenging. For instance, the analysis of cardiac motion acquires both spatial and temporal information from the heartbeat cycle. To address this issue, we propose a novel reconstruction-based approach named CardiacNet to learn a better representation of local cardiac structures and motion abnormalities through echocardiogram videos. CardiacNet is accompanied by the Consistency Deformation Codebook (CDC) and the Consistency Deformed-Discriminator (CDD) to learn the commonalities across abnormal and normal samples by incorporating cardiac prior knowledge. In addition, we propose benchmark datasets named CardiacNet-PAH and CardiacNet-ASD to evaluate the effectiveness of cardiac disease assessment. In experiments, our CardiacNet can achieve state-of-the-art results in three different cardiac disease assessment tasks on public datasets CAMUS, EchoNet, and our datasets. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/CardiacNet.

Jiewen Yang, Yiqun Lin, Bin Pu et al.

Quantitative analysis of cardiac motion is crucial for assessing cardiac function. This analysis typically uses imaging modalities such as MRI and Echocardiograms that capture detailed image sequences throughout the heartbeat cycle. Previous methods predominantly focused on the analysis of image pairs lacking consideration of the motion dynamics and spatial variability. Consequently, these methods often overlook the long-term relationships and regional motion characteristic of cardiac. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the \textbf{GPTrack}, a novel unsupervised framework crafted to fully explore the temporal and spatial dynamics of cardiac motion. The GPTrack enhances motion tracking by employing the sequential Gaussian Process in the latent space and encoding statistics by spatial information at each time stamp, which robustly promotes temporal consistency and spatial variability of cardiac dynamics. Also, we innovatively aggregate sequential information in a bidirectional recursive manner, mimicking the behavior of diffeomorphic registration to better capture consistent long-term relationships of motions across cardiac regions such as the ventricles and atria. Our GPTrack significantly improves the precision of motion tracking in both 3D and 4D medical images while maintaining computational efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/GPTrack