Authors:
Patricio Astudillo
1
;
Peter Mortier
1
;
Matthieu De Beule
1
and
Francis Wyffels
2
Affiliations:
1
FEops, Technologiepark 122, Zwijnaarde 9052, Belgium
;
2
Department of Electronics and Information Systems, UGent - imec, Technologiepark 126, Zwijnaarde 9052, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Biomedical Informatics, Cardiography, Medical Information Systems, Semi-supervised Learning.
Abstract:
Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is associated with conduction abnormalities and the mechanical interaction between the prosthesis and the atrioventricular (AV) conduction path cause these life-threatening arrhythmias. Pre-operative assessment of the location of the AV conduction path can help to understand the risk of post-TAVI conduction abnormalities. As the AV conduction path is not visible on cardiac CT, the inferior border of the membranous septum can be used as an anatomical landmark. Detecting this border automatically, accurately and efficiently would save operator time and thus benefit pre-operative planning. This preliminary study was performed to identify the feasibility of 3D landmark detection in cardiac CT images with curriculum deep Q-learning. In this study, curriculum learning was used to gradually teach an artificial agent to detect this anatomical landmark from cardiac CT. This agent was equipped with a small field of view and burdened with a large a
ction-space. Moreover, we introduced two novel action-selection strategies: α-decay and action-dropout. We compared these two strategies to the already established ε-decay strategy and observed that α-decay yielded the most accurate results. Limited computational resources were used to ensure reproducibility. In order to maximize the amount of patient data, the method was cross-validated with k-folding for all three action-selection strategies. An inter-operator variability study was conducted to assess the accuracy of the method.
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