Enhancing left ventricular segmentation in echocardiograms through GAN-based synthetic data augmentation and MultiResUNet architecture

Background: Accurate segmentation of the left ventricle in echocardiograms is crucial for the diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. However, this process is hindered by the limited availability of high-quality annotated datasets and the inherent complexities of echocardiogram images. Traditional methods often struggle to generalize across varying image qualities and conditions, necessitating a more robust solution.

Objectives: This study aims to enhance left ventricular segmentation in echocardiograms by developing a framework that integrates Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for synthetic data augmentation with a MultiResUNet architecture, providing a more accurate and reliable segmentation method.

Methods: We propose a GAN-based framework that generates synthetic echocardiogram images and their corresponding segmentation masks, augmenting the available training data. The synthetic data, along with real echocardiograms from the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset, were used to train the MultiResUNet architecture. MultiResUNet incorporates multi-resolution blocks, residual connections, and attention mechanisms to effectively capture fine details at multiple scales. Additional enhancements include atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and scaled exponential linear units (SELUs) to further improve segmentation accuracy.

Results: The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 95.68% and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 91.62%. This represents improvements of 2.58% in Dice and 4.84% in IoU over previous segmentation techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of GAN-based augmentation in overcoming data scarcity and improving segmentation performance.

Conclusions: The integration of GAN-generated synthetic data and the MultiResUNet architecture provides a robust and accurate solution for left ventricular segmentation in echocardiograms. This approach has the potential to enhance clinical decision-making in cardiovascular medicine by improving the accuracy of automated diagnostic tools, even in the presence of limited and complex training data.