Non-Invasive Diagnosis of Chronic Myocardial Infarction via Composite In-Silico-Human Data Learning

Abstract

Myocardial infarction (MI) continues to be a leading cause of death worldwide. The precise quantification of infarcted tissue is crucial to diagnosis, therapeutic management, and post-MI care. Late gadolinium enhancement-cardiac magnetic resonance (LGE-CMR) is regarded as the gold standard for precise infarct tissue localization in MI patients. A fundamental limitation of LGE-CMR is the invasive intravenous introduction of gadolinium-based contrast agents that present potential high-risk toxicity, particularly for individuals with underlying chronic kidney diseases. Herein, a completely non-invasive methodology is developed to identify the location and extent of an infarct region in the left ventricle via a machine learning (ML) model using only cardiac strains as inputs. In this transformative approach, the remarkable performance of a multi-fidelity ML model is demonstrated, which combines rodent-based in-silico-generated training data (low-fidelity) with very limited patient-specific human data (high-fidelity) in predicting LGE ground truth. The results offer a new paradigm for developing feasible prognostic tools by augmenting synthetic simulation-based data with very small amounts of in vivo human data. More broadly, the proposed approach can significantly assist with addressing biomedical challenges in healthcare where human data are limited.

Keywords: CMR‐LGE; UNet architectures; cardiac strains; multi‐fidelity; myocardial infarction.