Uncertainty‐guided symmetric multilevel supervision network for 3D left atrium segmentation in late gadolinium‐enhanced MRI

Abstract Purpose Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia and requires volumetric imaging to guide the therapy procedure. Late gadolinium‐enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE MRI) is an efficient noninvasive technology for imaging the diseased heart. Three‐dimensional segmentation of the left atrium (LA) in LGE MRI is a fundamental step for guiding the therapy of patients with AF. However, the low contrast and fuzzy surface of the LA in LGE MRI make accurate and objective LA segmentation a challenge. The purpose of this study is to propose an automatic and efficient LA segmentation model based on a convolutional neural network to obtain a more accurate predicted surface and improve the LA segmentation results. Methods In this study, we proposed an uncertainty‐guided symmetric multilevel supervision (SML) network for 3D LA segmentation in LGE MRI. First, we constructed an SML structure to combine the corresponding features from the encoding and decoding stages to learn the multiscale representation of LA. Second, we formulated the discrepancy of predictions of our model as model uncertainty. Then we proposed an uncertainty‐guided objective function to further increase the segmentation accuracy on the surface. Results We evaluated our proposed model on the public LA segmentation database using four universal metrics. The proposed model achieved Hausdorff Distance (HD) of 11.68 mm, average symmetric surface distance of 0.92 mm, Dice score of 0.92, and Jaccard of 0.85. Compared with state‐of‐the‐art models, our model achieved the best HD that is sensitive to surface accuracy. For the other three metrics, our model also achieved better or comparable performance. Conclusions We proposed an efficient automatic LA segmentation model that consisted of an SML structure and an uncertainty‐guided objective function. Compared to other models, we designed an additional supervision branch in the encoding stage to learn more detailed representations of LA while learning global context information through the multilevel structure of each supervision branch. To address the fuzzy surface challenge of LA segmentation in LGE MRI, we leveraged the model uncertainty to enhance the distinguishing ability of the model on the surface, thereby the predicted accuracy of the LA surface can be further increased. We conducted extensive ablation and comparative experiments with state‐of‐the‐art models. The experiment results demonstrated that our proposed model could handle the complex structure of LA and had superior advantages in improving the segmentation performance on the surface.