Estimation of the volume of the left ventricle from MRI images using deep neural networks

Segmenting human left ventricle (LV) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images and calculating its volume are important for diagnosing cardiac diseases. In 2016, Kaggle organized a competition to estimate the volume of LV from MRI images. The dataset consisted of a large number of cases, but only provided systole and diastole volumes as labels. We designed a system based on neural networks to solve this problem. It began with a detector combined with a neural network classifier for detecting regions of interest (ROIs) containing LV chambers. Then a deep neural network named hypercolumns fully convolutional network was used to segment LV in ROIs. The 2D segmentation results were integrated across different images to estimate the volume. With ground-truth volume labels, this model was trained end-to-end. To improve the result, an additional dataset with only segmentation label was used. The model was trained alternately on these two datasets with different types of teaching signals. We also proposed a variance estimation method for the final prediction. Our algorithm ranked the 4th on the test set in this competition.