Heterogeneity measurement of cardiac tissues leveraging uncertainty information from image segmentation

Abstract

Identifying arrhythmia substrates and quantifying their heterogeneity has great potential to provide critical guidance for radio frequency ablation. However, quantitative analysis of heterogeneity on cardiac optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is lacking. In this paper, we conduct the first study on quantifying cardiac tissue heterogeneity from human OCT images. Our proposed method applies a dropout-based Monte Carlo sampling technique to measure the model uncertainty. The heterogeneity information is extracted by decoupling the intra/inter-tissue heterogeneity and tissue boundary uncertainty from the uncertainty measurement. We empirically demonstrate that our model can highlight the subtle features from OCT images, and the heterogeneity information extracted is positively correlated with the tissue heterogeneity information from corresponding histology images.