  Cardiovascular disease accounts for 1 in every 4 deaths in United States.
Accurate estimation of structural and functional cardiac parameters is crucial
for both diagnosis and disease management. In this work, we develop an ensemble
learning framework for more accurate and robust left ventricle (LV)
quantification. The framework combines two 1st-level modules: direct estimation
module and a segmentation module. The direct estimation module utilizes
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to achieve end-to-end quantification. The
CNN is trained by taking 2D cardiac images as input and cardiac parameters as
output. The segmentation module utilizes a U-Net architecture for obtaining
pixel-wise prediction of the epicardium and endocardium of LV from the
background. The binary U-Net output is then analyzed by a separate CNN for
estimating the cardiac parameters. We then employ linear regression between the
1st-level predictor and ground truth to learn a 2nd-level predictor that
ensembles the results from 1st-level modules for the final estimation.
Preliminary results by testing the proposed framework on the LVQuan18 dataset
show superior performance of the ensemble learning model over the two base
modules.
