Decision-based AI Visual Navigation for Cardiac Ultrasounds
This work addresses the need for accessible cardiac diagnostics outside hospitals by enabling novice sonographers to use affordable ultrasound machines, though it builds incrementally on existing AI navigation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automating cardiac ultrasound navigation by developing an AI system that identifies and localizes the inferior vena cava (IVC) in real-time, achieving strong performance on high-quality hospital videos and zero-shot on affordable handheld devices.
Ultrasound imaging of the heart (echocardiography) is widely used to diagnose cardiac diseases. However, obtaining an echocardiogram requires an expert sonographer and a high-quality ultrasound imaging device, which are generally only available in hospitals. Recently, AI-based navigation models and algorithms have been used to aid novice sonographers in acquiring the standardized cardiac views necessary to visualize potential disease pathologies. These navigation systems typically rely on directional guidance to predict the necessary rotation of the ultrasound probe. This paper demonstrates a novel AI navigation system that builds on a decision model for identifying the inferior vena cava (IVC) of the heart. The decision model is trained offline using cardiac ultrasound videos and employs binary classification to determine whether the IVC is present in a given ultrasound video. The underlying model integrates a novel localization algorithm that leverages the learned feature representations to annotate the spatial location of the IVC in real-time. Our model demonstrates strong localization performance on traditional high-quality hospital ultrasound videos, as well as impressive zero-shot performance on lower-quality ultrasound videos from a more affordable Butterfly iQ handheld ultrasound machine. This capability facilitates the expansion of ultrasound diagnostics beyond hospital settings. Currently, the guidance system is undergoing clinical trials and is available on the Butterfly iQ app.