In the realm of cardiovascular medicine, medical imaging plays a crucial role in accurately classifying cardiac diseases and making precise diagnoses. However, the field faces significant challenges when integrating data science techniques, as a significant volume of images is required for these techniques. As a consequence, it is necessary to investigate different avenues to overcome this challenge. In this contribution, we offer an innovative tool to conquer this limitation. In particular, we delve into the application of a well recognized method known as the EigenFaces approach to classify cardiac diseases. This approach was originally motivated for efficiently representing pictures of faces using principal component analysis, which provides a set of eigenvectors (aka eigenfaces), explaining the variation between face images. As this approach proven to be efficient for face recognition, it motivated us to explore its efficiency on more complicated data bases. In particular, we integrate this approach, with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify echocardiography images taken from mice in five distinct cardiac conditions (healthy, diabetic cardiomyopathy, myocardial infarction, obesity and TAC hypertension). Performing a preprocessing step inspired from the eigenfaces approach on the echocardiography datasets, yields sets of pod modes, which we will call eigenhearts. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we compare two testcases: (i) supplying the CNN with the original images directly, (ii) supplying the CNN with images projected into the obtained pod modes. The results show a substantial and noteworthy enhancement when employing SVD for pre-processing, with classification accuracy increasing by approximately 50%.

Heart diseases are the main international cause of human defunction. According to the WHO, nearly 18 million people decease each year because of heart diseases. Also considering the increase of medical data, much pressure is put on the health industry to develop systems for early and accurate heart disease recognition. In this work, an automatic cardiac pathology recognition system based on a novel deep learning framework is proposed, which analyses in real-time echocardiography video sequences. The system works in two stages. The first one transforms the data included in a database of echocardiography sequences into a machine-learning-compatible collection of annotated images which can be used in the training stage of any kind of machine learning-based framework, and more specifically with deep learning. This includes the use of the Higher Order Dynamic Mode Decomposition (HODMD) algorithm, for the first time to the authors' knowledge, for both data augmentation and feature extraction in the medical field. The second stage is focused on building and training a Vision Transformer (ViT), barely explored in the related literature. The ViT is adapted for an effective training from scratch, even with small datasets. The designed neural network analyses images from an echocardiography sequence to predict the heart state. The results obtained show the superiority of the proposed system and the efficacy of the HODMD algorithm, even outperforming pretrained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are so far the method of choice in the literature.

Currently, medical image domain translation operations show a high demand from researchers and clinicians. Amongst other capabilities, this task allows the generation of new medical images with sufficiently high image quality, making them clinically relevant. Deep Learning (DL) architectures, most specifically deep generative models, are widely used to generate and translate images from one domain to another. The proposed framework relies on an adversarial Denoising Diffusion Model (DDM) to synthesize echocardiography images and perform domain translation. Contrary to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), DDMs are able to generate high quality image samples with a large diversity. If a DDM is combined with a GAN, this ability to generate new data is completed at an even faster sampling time. In this work we trained an adversarial DDM combined with a GAN to learn the reverse denoising process, relying on a guide image, making sure relevant anatomical structures of each echocardiography image were kept and represented on the generated image samples. For several domain translation operations, the results verified that such generative model was able to synthesize high quality image samples: MSE: 11.50 +/- 3.69, PSNR (dB): 30.48 +/- 0.09, SSIM: 0.47 +/- 0.03. The proposed method showed high generalization ability, introducing a framework to create echocardiography images suitable to be used for clinical research purposes.