Flow Convergence Area Estimation on In Vitro Color Flow Doppler Images Using Deep Learning

We present an automatic method to estimate flow rate through the orifice in in-vitro 2D color-flow Doppler echocardiographic images. Flow rate properties are important for the assessment of pathologies like mitral regurgitation. We expect this method to be transferable to in-vivo patient data. The method consists of two main parts: (a) detecting a bounding box which encloses aliasing contours and its surroundings (namely a region representative of flow convergence area), (b) application of Convolutional Neural Networks for regression to estimate the flow convergence area. Best result achieved is the 5% mean error for validation data which is from other experiments that were used for training. Given the small number of training data, this method shows promising results.