Progress in the Clinical Application of Artificial Intelligence for Left Ventricle Analysis in Cardiac Magnetic Resonance

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging enables a one-stop assessment of heart structure and function. Artificial intelligence (AI) can simplify and automate work flows and improve image post-processing speed and diagnostic accuracy; thus, it greatly affects many aspects of CMR. This review highlights the application of AI for left heart analysis in CMR, including quality control, image segmentation, and global and regional functional assessment. Most recent research has focused on segmentation of the left ventricular myocardium and blood pool. Although many algorithms have shown a level comparable to that of human experts, some problems, such as poor performance of basal and apical segmentation and false identification of myocardial structure, remain. Segmentation of myocardial fibrosis is another research hotspot, and most patient cohorts of such studies have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Whether the above methods are applicable to other patient groups requires further study. The use of automated CMR interpretation for the diagnosis and prognosis assessment of cardiovascular diseases demonstrates great clinical potential. However, prospective large-scale clinical trials are needed to investigate the real-word application of AI technology in clinical practice.