# Towards Robust Cardiac Segmentation using Graph Convolutional Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01210 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01210/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [What Are Bayesian Neural Network Posteriors Really Like?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14421/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Segmentation using an Open Large-Scale Dataset in 2D Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06948/) (2019)
- [Anatomically Constrained Neural Networks (ACNN): Application to Cardiac Image Enhancement and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08302/) (2017)
- [Cardiac Segmentation with Strong Anatomical Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08825/) (2020)
- [Improving anatomical plausibility in medical image segmentation via hybrid graph neural networks: applications to chest x-ray analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10977/) (2022)
- [Light-weight spatio-temporal graphs for segmentation and ejection fraction prediction in cardiac ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02549/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DAM-Seg: Anatomically accurate cardiac segmentation using Dense Associative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15128/) (2025)
- [Generative augmentations for improved cardiac ultrasound segmentation using diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20100/) (2025)
- [Lightweight image segmentation for echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03631/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fully automatic cardiac segmentation can be a fast and reproducible method to extract clinical measurements from an echocardiography examination. The U-Net architecture is the current state-of-the-art deep learning architecture for medical segmentation and can segment cardiac structures in real-time with average errors comparable to inter-observer variability. However, this architecture still generates large outliers that are often anatomically incorrect. This work uses the concept of graph convolutional neural networks that predict the contour points of the structures of interest instead of labeling each pixel. We propose a graph architecture that uses two convolutional rings based on cardiac anatomy and show that this eliminates anatomical incorrect multi-structure segmentations on the publicly available CAMUS dataset. Additionally, this work contributes with an ablation study on the graph convolutional architecture and an evaluation of clinical measurements on the clinical HUNT4 dataset. Finally, we propose to use the inter-model agreement of the U-Net and the graph network as a predictor of both the input and segmentation quality. We show this predictor can detect out-of-distribution and unsuitable input images in real-time. Source code is available online: https://github.com/gillesvntnu/GCN_multistructure