Deep learning interpretation of echocardiograms

Echocardiography uses ultrasound technology to capture high temporal and spatial resolution images of the heart and surrounding structures, and is the most common imaging modality in cardiovascular medicine. Using convolutional neural networks on a large new dataset, we show that deep learning applied to echocardiography can identify local cardiac structures, estimate cardiac function, and predict systemic phenotypes that modify cardiovascular risk but not readily identifiable to human interpretation. Our deep learning model, EchoNet, accurately identified the presence of pacemaker leads (AUC = 0.89), enlarged left atrium (AUC = 0.86), left ventricular hypertrophy (AUC = 0.75), left ventricular end systolic and diastolic volumes (R² = 0.74 and R² = 0.70), and ejection fraction (R² = 0.50), as well as predicted systemic phenotypes of age (R² = 0.46), sex (AUC = 0.88), weight (R² = 0.56), and height (R² = 0.33). Interpretation analysis validates that EchoNet shows appropriate attention to key cardiac structures when performing human-explainable tasks and highlights hypothesis-generating regions of interest when predicting systemic phenotypes difficult for human interpretation. Machine learning on echocardiography images can streamline repetitive tasks in the clinical workflow, provide preliminary interpretation in areas with insufficient qualified cardiologists, and predict phenotypes challenging for human evaluation.

Amirata Ghorbani, David Ouyang, Abubakar Abid, Bryan He, Jonathan H. Chen, Robert A. Harrington, David H. Liang, Euan A. Ashley, James Y. Zou