ACNET: Attention-based Convolution Network with Additional Discriminative Features for DCM Classification (S)

Abstract

For dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) patients, immediate emergency diagnosis and treatment are critical for life saving and later recovery. T1 mapping is a non-invasive and effective diagnostic imaging approach to detect DCM. However, it is a demanding and time-consuming approach. In this paper, we propose an attention-based network structure, which can automatically identify DCM patients in a speedy manner to prioritize their treatment. In the proposed method, we adopt attention modules to generate attention-aware features. Inside each attention module, a bottom-up top-down feed-forward structure is used to unfold the feed-forward and feed-back attention processes into a single feed-forward process. It allows the network to focus more on determining useful information about the current output that is significant in the input data. Moreover, inspired by the residual network idea, we make full use of the characteristics of the original data. Combined residual block, we design down-residual modules for classification tasks. It consists of seven convolution layers and three layers of residual blocks. Our network achieves the most advanced recognition performance on cardiac datasets. We evaluated our approach on CMR(cardiac magnetic resonance) T1 mapping images with lower PSNR(peak signal to noise ratio), and the results demonstrate that our architecture outperforms previous approaches.