PRECISE-AS: Personalized Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Point-of-Care Echocardiography in Aortic Stenosis Diagnosis
This work addresses the challenge of resource-constrained point-of-care ultrasound for aortic stenosis diagnosis, particularly in underserved areas, by making echocardiographic assessments more efficient and personalized.
The paper tackled the problem of limited access to echocardiography for aortic stenosis diagnosis by proposing a reinforcement learning framework that dynamically selects the most informative echo videos, achieving 80.6% classification accuracy while using only 47% of the videos compared to full acquisition.
Aortic stenosis (AS) is a life-threatening condition caused by a narrowing of the aortic valve, leading to impaired blood flow. Despite its high prevalence, access to echocardiography (echo), the gold-standard diagnostic tool, is often limited due to resource constraints, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) offers a more accessible alternative but is restricted by operator expertise and the challenge of selecting the most relevant imaging views. To address this, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-driven active video acquisition framework that dynamically selects each patient's most informative echo videos. Unlike traditional methods that rely on a fixed set of videos, our approach continuously evaluates whether additional imaging is needed, optimizing both accuracy and efficiency. Tested on data from 2,572 patients, our method achieves 80.6% classification accuracy while using only 47% of the echo videos compared to a full acquisition. These results demonstrate the potential of active feature acquisition to enhance AS diagnosis, making echocardiographic assessments more efficient, scalable, and personalized. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/Armin-Saadat/PRECISE-AS.