Classification of Heart Views in Ultrasound Images

Sammanfattning: In today’s society, we experience an increasing challenge to provide healthcare to everyone in need due to the increasing number of patients and the shortage of medical staff. Computers have contributed to mitigating this challenge by offloading the medical staff from some of the tasks. With the rise of deep learning, countless new possibilities have opened to help the medical staff even further. One domain where deep learning can be applied is analysis of ultrasound images. In this thesis we investigate the problem of classifying standard views of the heart in ultrasound images with the help of deep learning. We conduct mainly three experiments. First, we use NasNet mobile, InceptionV3, VGG16 and MobileNet, pre-trained on ImageNet, and finetune them to ultrasound heart images. We compare the accuracy of these networks to each other and to the baselinemodel, a CNN that was proposed in [23]. Then we assess a neural network’s capability to generalize to images from ultrasound machines that the network is not trained on. Lastly, we test how the performance of the networks degrades with decreasing amount of training data. Our first experiment shows that all networks considered in this study have very similar performance in terms of accuracy with Inception V3 being slightly better than the rest. The best performance is achieved when the whole network is finetuned to our problem instead of finetuning only apart of it, while gradually unlocking more layers for training. The generalization experiment shows that neural networks have the potential to generalize to images from ultrasound machines that they are not trained on. It also shows that having a mix of multiple ultrasound machines in the training data increases generalization performance. In our last experiment we compare the performance of the CNN proposed in [23] with MobileNet pre-trained on ImageNet and MobileNet randomly initialized. This shows that the performance of the baseline model suffers the least with decreasing amount of training data and that pre-training helps the performance drastically on smaller training datasets.