# Deep Learning Pipeline for Fully Automated Myocardial Infarct Segmentation from Clinical Cardiac MR Scans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03272/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2025.

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

- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Multivariate mixture model for myocardium segmentation combining multi-source images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08820/) (2016)
- [Interactive Medical Image Segmentation using Deep Learning with Image-specific Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04043/) (2017)
- [MyoPS: A Benchmark of Myocardial Pathology Segmentation Combining Three-Sequence Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03186/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning methods for automatic evaluation of delayed enhancement-MRI. The results of the EMIDEC challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04016/) (2021)
- [Cardiac Segmentation from LGE MRI Using Deep Neural Network Incorporating Shape and Spatial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07347/) (2019)
- [Are we using appropriate segmentation metrics? Identifying correlates of human expert perception for CNN training beyond rolling the DICE coefficient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06205/) (2021)
- [Error correcting 2D-3D cascaded network for myocardial infarct scar segmentation on late gadolinium enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14725/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning-based method that allows to perform myocardial infarct segmentation in a fully-automated way. Materials and Methods: For this retrospective study, a cascaded framework of two and three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), specialized on identifying ischemic myocardial scars on late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images, was trained on an in-house training dataset consisting of 144 examinations. On a separate test dataset from the same institution, including images from 152 examinations obtained between 2021 and 2023, a quantitative comparison between artificial intelligence (AI)-based segmentations and manual segmentations was performed. Further, qualitative assessment of segmentation accuracy was evaluated for both human and AI-generated contours by two CMR experts in a blinded experiment. Results: Excellent agreement could be found between manually and automatically calculated infarct volumes (ρc = 0.9). The qualitative evaluation showed that compared to human-based measurements, the experts rated the AI-based segmentations to better represent the actual extent of infarction significantly (p < 0.001) more often (33.4% AI, 25.1% human, 41.5% equal). On the contrary, for segmentation of microvascular obstruction (MVO), manual measurements were still preferred (11.3% AI, 55.6% human, 33.1% equal). Conclusion: This fully-automated segmentation pipeline enables CMR infarct size to be calculated in a very short time and without requiring any pre-processing of the input images while matching the segmentation quality of trained human observers. In a blinded experiment, experts preferred automated infarct segmentations more often than manual segmentations, paving the way for a potential clinical application.
