Classification of Left Atrial Appendage Morphology Using Deep Learning

Atrial fibrillation, a common cardiac arrhythmia, can lead to blood clots in the left atrial appendage (LAA) of the heart, increasing the risk of stroke. Understanding the LAA morphology can indicate the likelihood of a blood clot. Therefore, a classification convolutional neural network was implemented to predict the LAA morphology. Using 2D images of 3D models created from MRI scans of fixed human hearts and a pre-trained network, an 8.7% error rate was achieved. The network can be improved with more data or expanded to classify the LAA from the automatically segmented DICOM datasets and measure the LAA ostia.