An attention-guided network for bilateral ventricular segmentation in pediatric echocardiography

由于儿童心脏大小随年龄变化显著，且儿童心率较快，超声心动图心脏边界相较成人更模糊，因此儿科超声心动图的准确分割是一项具有挑战性的任务。针对上述问题，本文提出了一种结合通道注意力和尺度注意力的双解码器网络模型。首先，利用结合深监督策略的注意力引导解码器，获取心室区域的注意力图；然后，将产生的心室注意力通过跳跃连接返回到网络的多个层，调整编码器生成的特征权重，突出左右心室区域；最后，通过尺度注意力模块和通道注意力模块强化左右心室边缘特征。实验结果表明，本文所提方法在所采集的双侧心室分割数据集中，平均戴斯系数（DSC）达到90.63%，优于医学图像分割领域一些常规和最新方法，尤其在心室边缘处分割更清晰。本文的研究可为儿科超声心动图双侧心室分割以及后续先天性心脏病辅助诊断提供新的解决方案。.; Accurate segmentation of pediatric echocardiograms is a challenging task, because significant heart-size changes with age and faster heart rate lead to more blurred boundaries on cardiac ultrasound images compared with adults. To address these problems, a dual decoder network model combining channel attention and scale attention is proposed in this paper. Firstly, an attention-guided decoder with deep supervision strategy is used to obtain attention maps for the ventricular regions. Then, the generated ventricular attention is fed back to multiple layers of the network through skip connections to adjust the feature weights generated by the encoder and highlight the left and right ventricular areas. Finally, a scale attention module and a channel attention module are utilized to enhance the edge features of the left and right ventricles. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method in this paper achieves an average Dice coefficient of 90.63% in acquired bilateral ventricular segmentation dataset, which is better than some conventional and state-of-the-art methods in the field of medical image segmentation. More importantly, the method has a more accurate effect in segmenting the edge of the ventricle. The results of this paper can provide a new solution for pediatric echocardiographic bilateral ventricular segmentation and subsequent auxiliary diagnosis of congenital heart disease.