CardiacNet: Learning to Reconstruct Abnormalities for Cardiac Disease Assessment from Echocardiogram Videos

Echocardiography plays a crucial role in analyzing cardiac function and diagnosing cardiac diseases. Current deep neural network methods primarily aim to enhance diagnosis accuracy by incorporating prior knowledge, such as segmenting cardiac structures or lesions annotated by human experts. However, diagnosing the inconsistent behaviours of the heart, which exist across both spatial and temporal dimensions, remains extremely challenging. For instance, the analysis of cardiac motion acquires both spatial and temporal information from the heartbeat cycle. To address this issue, we propose a novel reconstruction-based approach named CardiacNet to learn a better representation of local cardiac structures and motion abnormalities through echocardiogram videos. CardiacNet is accompanied by the Consistency Deformation Codebook (CDC) and the Consistency Deformed-Discriminator (CDD) to learn the commonalities across abnormal and normal samples by incorporating cardiac prior knowledge. In addition, we propose benchmark datasets named CardiacNet-PAH and CardiacNet-ASD for evaluating the effectiveness of cardiac disease assessment. In experiments, our CardiacNet can achieve state-of-the-art results in downstream tasks, i.e., classification and regression, on public datasets CAMUS, EchoNet, and our datasets. The codes and datasets will be publicly available.