An attention-guided network for bilateral ventricular segmentation in pediatric echocardiography / 生物医学工程学杂志

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.

Atresia pulmonar con septum interventricular intacto / Pulmonary atresia with intact ventricular septum, a thematic review

La atresia pulmonar con septum interventricular intacto es una cardiopatía congénita cianótica aparentemente sencilla caracterizada por incorporar diversas variantes morfológicas y lesiones asociadas que conllevan a un diagnóstico y tratamiento más complejo del que inicialmente podría esperarse. La elevada mortalidad antes de los 6 meses de edad obliga a instaurar una conducta agresiva y precoz. Con esta revisión nos hemos propuesto efectuar la evaluación integral de la enfermedad desde sus elementos conceptuales hasta las variantes terapéuticas a adoptar, para lo cual se describen los aspectos más importantes en cuanto a morfología, fisiopatología, diagnóstico y tratamiento. Se discute, asimismo, el papel de la ecocardiografía, de la cirugía y de las técnicas de cardiología intervencionista. La estrategia fundamental del tratamiento es separar las circulaciones sistémica y pulmonar sin provocar disminución del gasto cardíaco ni aumentos en la presión venosa central. Se pretende, además, rescatar al ventrículo derecho para el circuito pulmonar siempre que la circulación coronaria no sea dependiente de aquel. Se resalta, mediante algoritmo, la importancia que reviste la integración de modalidades quirúrgicas, intervencionistas e híbridas en el acometimiento terapéutico de esta cardiopatía.

Pulmonary atresia with intact ventricular septum is an apparently simple cyanotic congenital cardiopathy, characterized by several morphological variants and associated lesions leading to a complex diagnosis and treatment. The high mortality rate recorded in under 6 months-old infants demands an early aggressive management to face this situation. This review was intended to make a comprehensive assessment of the disease from its basic conceptual elements to the therapeutic variants to be adopted. To this end, the most important elements of morphology, physiopathology, diagnosis and treatment were addressed, in addition to discussing the roles of echocardiography, surgery and interventional cardiology techniques. The fundamental strategy of treatment is to separate the systemic circulation from the pulmonary circulation, causing neither reduction of the cardiac output nor increase of the central venous pressure. It is also aimed to return the right ventricle to the pulmonary circuit, provided that the coronary circulation does not depend on it. The algorithm presented in this paper underlined the importance of the integration of the surgical, interventional and hybrid modalities for the therapeutic management of this cardiopathy.