Diagnosis of fetal arrhythmia in echocardiography imaging using deep learning with cyclic loss

Background: Fetal arrhythmias frequently co-occur with congenital heart disease in fetuses. The peaks observed in M-mode fetal echocardiograms serve as pivotal diagnostic markers for fetal arrhythmias. However, speckles, artifacts, and noise pose notable challenges for accurate image analysis. While current deep learning networks mainly overlook cardiac cyclic information, this study concentrated on the integration of such features, leveraging contextual constraints derived from cardiac cyclical features to improve diagnostic accuracy. Methods: This study proposed a novel deep learning architecture for diagnosing fetal arrhythmias. The architecture presented a loss function tailored to the cardiac cyclical information and formulated a diagnostic algorithm for classifying fetal arrhythmias. The training and validation processes utilized a dataset comprising 4440 patches gathered from 890 participants. Results: Incorporating cyclic loss significantly enhanced the performance of deep learning networks in predicting peak points for diagnosing fetal arrhythmia, resulting in improvements ranging from 7.11% to 14.81% in F1-score across different network combinations. Particularly noteworthy was the 18.2% improvement in the F1-score for the low-quality group. Additionally, the precision of diagnosing fetal arrhythmia across four categories exhibited improvement, with an average improvement rate of 20.6%. Conclusion: This study introduced a cyclic loss mechanism based on the cardiac cycle information. Comparative evaluations were conducted using baseline methods and state-of-the-art deep learning architectures with the fetal echocardiogram dataset. These evaluations demonstrated the proposed framework’s superior accuracy in diagnosing fetal arrhythmias. It is also crucial to note that further external testing is essential to assess the model’s generalizability and clinical value.