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A generalizable deep learning system for cardiac MRI.

March 25, 2026pubmed logopapers

Authors

Shad R,Zakka C,Kaur D,Mathur M,Fong R,Cho J,Filice RW,Mongan J,Kallianos K,Khandwala N,Eng D,Leipzig M,Witschey WR,de Feria A,Ferrari VA,Ashley EA,Acker MA,Langlotz C,Hiesinger W

Affiliations (11)

  • Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. [email protected].
  • Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
  • Department of Radiology, Medstar Georgetown University Hospital, Washington, DC, USA.
  • Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
  • Bunkerhill Health, San Francisco, CA, USA.
  • Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  • Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  • Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Genetics, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
  • Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  • Department of Radiology, Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
  • Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. [email protected].

Abstract

Cardiac MRI allows for a comprehensive assessment of myocardial structure, function and tissue characteristics. Here we describe a foundational vision system for cardiac MRI, capable of representing the breadth of human cardiovascular disease and health. Our deep-learning model is trained via self-supervised contrastive learning, in which visual concepts in cine-sequence cardiac MRI scans are learned from the raw text of the accompanying radiology reports. We train and evaluate our model on data from four large academic clinical institutions in the United States. We additionally showcase the performance of our models on the UK BioBank and two additional publicly available external datasets. We explore emergent capabilities of our system and demonstrate remarkable performance across a range of tasks, including the problem of left-ventricular ejection fraction regression and the diagnosis of 39 different conditions such as cardiac amyloidosis and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We show that our deep-learning system is capable of not only contextualizing the staggering complexity of human cardiovascular disease but can be directed towards clinical problems of interest, yielding impressive, clinical-grade diagnostic accuracy with a fraction of the training data typically required for such tasks.

Topics

Journal Article

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