Temporally Consistent Mitral Annulus Measurements from Sparse Annotations in Echocardiographic Videos
This work addresses the challenge of accurate and stable cardiac measurements in medical imaging for clinicians, representing an incremental improvement with specific gains in error metrics.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving temporally consistent mitral annulus landmark localization in echocardiography videos using sparse annotations, resulting in a mean absolute MAPSE error of 1.81 ± 0.14 mm, annulus size error of 2.46 ± 0.31 mm, and landmark localization error of 2.48 ± 0.07 mm.
This work presents a novel approach to achieving temporally consistent mitral annulus landmark localization in echocardiography videos using sparse annotations. Our method introduces a self-supervised loss term that enforces temporal consistency between neighboring frames, which smooths the position of landmarks and enhances measurement accuracy over time. Additionally, we incorporate realistic field-of-view augmentations to improve the recognition of missing anatomical landmarks. We evaluate our approach on both a public and private dataset, and demonstrate significant improvements in Mitral Annular Plane Systolic Excursion (MAPSE) calculations and overall landmark tracking stability. The method achieves a mean absolute MAPSE error of 1.81 $\pm$ 0.14 mm, an annulus size error of 2.46 $\pm$ 0.31 mm, and a landmark localization error of 2.48 $\pm$ 0.07 mm. Finally, it achieves a 0.99 ROC-AUC for recognition of missing landmarks.