Residual Convolutional Neural Network for Cardiac Image Segmentation and Heart Disease Diagnosis

Deep learning (DL) has been widely used in biomedical image segmentation and automatic disease diagnosis, leading to state-of-the-art performance. However, automated cardiac disease diagnosis heavily relies on cardiac segmentation maps from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), most current DL segmentation methods, such as 2D convolution on planes, 3D convolution, are not fully applicable to CMR due to loss of spatial structure information or large gap between slices. To make better exploit spatial aspects of the CMR data to improve cardiac segmentation accuracy, we propose a new DL segmentation structure, which consists of a residual convolution neural network for compressing the intra-slice information, and a bidirectional-convolutional long short term memory (Bi-CLSTM) for leveraging the inter-slice contexts. Moreover, automatic disease diagnosis has been conducted using the segmentation maps. Experimental results of the automatic cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC) show that our cardiac segmentation structure and disease diagnosis methods have achieved promising results and it can be widely extended to computer-aided diagnosis.