Research progress in the artificial intelligence-assisted measurement of myocardial strain

Abstract

Myocardial strain is a dimensionless parameter reflecting the degree of deformation of the whole or local myocardium under stress, which can quantitatively detect myocardial injury and guide the early diagnosis, intervention and prognostic assessment of cardiac diseases. Cardiac ultrasound, cardiac CT and cardiac magnetic resonance can all be used for strain imaging and analysis, with two-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography being the most widely used means of myocardial strain detection today. However, due to inter-observer variations in manual analysis of myocardial strain and differences in the imaging systems and analysis software, the consistency and reproducibility of measured strain values among vendors are poor, limiting the clinical application of myocardial strain. Artificial intelligence (AI) can overcome the defects of strain measurement to a certain extent through automatic strain calculation and image quality assessment, which has a broad developmental prospect. This review focuses on the progress of AI-assisted measurement of myocardial strain in ultrasound, magnetic resonance, and other imaging modalities, as well as its application to disease diagnosis and patient prognosis assessment. This will improve the efficiency and consistency of strain measurement and promote the routine application of myocardial strain to clinical practice, which will play an incremental role in assessing myocardial injury and cardiac function. However, most of the current studies involve small sample sizes and lack external validation, and the reliability of their results needs to be further verified.

Keywords

• myocardial strain
• artificial intelligence (ai)
• myocardial damage