Semantic-Aware Temporal Channel-Wise Attention For Cardiac Function Assessment

Cardiac function assessment aims at predicting left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) given an echocardiogram video, which requests models to focus on the changes in the left ventricle during the cardiac cycle. How to assess cardiac function accurately and automatically from an echocardiogram video is a valuable topic in intelligent assisted healthcare. Existing state-of-the-art methods do not pay attention to the left ventricular region, nor the left ventricular changes caused by motion. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised auxiliary learning paradigm with a left ventricular segmentation task, which contributes to the representation learning for the left ventricular region. To better model the importance of motion information, we introduce a temporal channel-wise attention (TCA) module to excite those channels used to describe motion. Furthermore, we reform the TCA module with semantic perception by taking the segmentation map of the left ventricle as input to focus on the motion patterns of the left ventricle. Finally, in order to reduce the difficulty of direct LVEF regression, we utilize an anchor-based classification and regression method to predict LVEF. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford dataset with an improvement of 0.22 MAE, 0.26 RMSE, and 1.9% R2, and it is robust to a wide range of simulated noise and video degradation.