Early detection of cardiovascular diseases is based on accurate quantification of the left ventricle (LV) function parameters. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic framework for LV volume and mass quantification from 2D-cine MR images already segmented using U-Net. The general framework consists of three main steps: Data preparation including automatic LV localization using a convolution neural network (CNN) and application of morphological operations to exclude papillary muscles from the LV cavity. The second step consists in automatically extracting the LV contours using U-Net architecture. Finally, by integrating temporal information which is manifested by a spatial motion of myocytes as a third dimension, we calculated LV volume, LV ejection fraction (LVEF) and left ventricle mass (LVM). Based on these parameters, we detected and quantified cardiac contraction abnormalities using Python software. CNN was trained with 35 patients and tested on 15 patients from the ACDC database with an accuracy of 99,15 %. U-Net architecture was trained using ACDC database and evaluated using local dataset with a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 99,78 % and a Hausdorff Distance (HD) of 4.468 mm (p < 0,001). Quantification results showed a strong correlation with physiological measures with a Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0,991 for LV volume, 0.962 for LVEF, 0.98 for stroke volume (SV) and 0.923 for LVM after pillars' elimination. Clinically, our method allows regional and accurate identification of pathological myocardial segments and can serve as a diagnostic aid tool of cardiac contraction abnormalities. Experimental results prove the usefulness of the proposed method for LV volume and function quantification and verify its potential clinical applicability.

The assessment of myocardial viability is crucial for the diagnosis and management of patients before revascularization, especially those at high-risk. The purpose of this study is to introduce an automatic framework for objective myocardial viability assessment using convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method was validated on 73 patients. The initial stage is regional quantification of myocardial wall thickness (MWT) in several radial directions based on automatic left ventricle segmentation using deep learning approach. Then, based on the quantification findings we proposed an objective protocol to evaluate myocardial viability of 49 sub-segments for each patient using CNN. The comparison in terms of performance of our method to related works proves its superiority with an average mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.21±1.00. Accurate quantification of MWT allowed the detection of myocardial segments desynchronization and the delimitation of infarction transmurality with an accuracy of 98.13%, a specificity of 99.09% and a sensitivity of 97.52% with (p_value<0.001). The obtained results proved that incorporating the suggested protocol in clinical practice may facilitate the differentiation between viable and non-viable segments, aiding in directing patient care and minimizing intra and inter-observer variability.

In clinical practice, left ventricle hypertrophy (LVH) continues to pose a considerable challenge, highlighting the need for more reliable diagnostic approaches. This study aims to propose an automated framework for the quantification of LVH extent and the classification of myocardial segments according to hypertrophy severity using a deep learning-based algorithm. The proposed method was validated on 133 subjects, including both healthy individuals and patients with LVH. The process starts with automatic LV segmentation using U-Net and the segmentation of the left ventricle cavity based on the American Heart Association (AHA) standards, followed by the division of each segment into three equal sub-segments. Then, an automated quantification of regional wall thickness (RWT) was performed. Finally, a convolutional neural network (CNN) was developed to classify each myocardial sub-segment according to hypertrophy severity. The proposed approach demonstrates strong performance in contour segmentation, achieving a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 98.47% and a Hausdorff Distance (HD) of 6.345 ± 3.5 mm. For thickness quantification, it reaches a minimal mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.01 ± 1.16. Regarding segment classification, it achieves competitive performance metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods with an accuracy of 98.19%, a precision of 98.27%, a recall of 99.13%, and an F1-score of 98.7%. The obtained results confirm the high performance of the proposed method and highlight its clinical utility in accurately assessing and classifying cardiac hypertrophy. This approach provides valuable insights that can guide clinical decision-making and improve patient management strategies.

Computational modeling has contributed to many fields of medicine and has been proven very useful for diagnosing complex diseases. A special case is that of myocardial infarction (MI), a prevalent cardiovascular disease where computational modeling approaches have been useful for detecting abnormalities. The aim of this paper is to propose enhanced computational models for the human left ventricle (LV) to estimate the strain and stress distributions in healthy and diseased subjects. Computational models were developed and evaluated using human LV of 20 patients with MI and 20 healthy controls using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging acquisitions and simulation tools. The finite element technique was employed for LV modeling. Comparative analysis revealed higher global strains in healthy subjects compared to MI patients, particularly global circumferential, longitudinal, and radial strains. The average stress distributions were 67.9 ± 5.01 kPa in healthy models and 78.3 ± 8.21 kPa in infarcted regions. Model-derived strain data indicated an overall average of −0.15 ± 0.06 for healthy models and 0.2 ± 0.04 for infarcted regions. LV strain values were compared with those obtained from two feature-tracking algorithms to validate the proposed models, resulting in very promising findings. The work presented here highlights the importance of computational modeling for quantitative and qualitative analyses of heart disease and the potential of using such models in other organs. When combined with imaging data, the proposed models can have significant implications for improved patient care and treatment strategies. Received: 3 June 2025 | Revised: 30 July 2025 | Accepted: 8 September 2025 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Author Contribution Statement Rania Awadi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Narjes Benameur: Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Wafa Baccouch: Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Mohamed Deriche: Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Arnab Palit: Validation, Visualization. Moncef Aloui: Resources, Data curation. Nadjia Kachenoura: Software, Validation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Salam Labidi: Methodology, Investigation, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.

Heart failure (HF) remains a major global cause of morbidity and mortality, where early diagnosis is critical for improving patient outcomes. Conventional single-modality approaches often fail to capture the complex and multifactorial nature of HF. This study investigates the feasibility of a late-fusion framework that integrates modality-specific predictions derived independently from cine-MRI, electrocardiographic signals, biomarkers and demographic data for HF prediction. Independent cine-MRI data from 281 patients, ECG recordings from the PTB-XL PhysioNet database and biomarker profiles from 157 patients were retrospectively analyzed as separate modality-specific cohorts. Twenty-five features were extracted and processed. Modality-specific models (Attention U-Net, MLP, XGBoost) were trained separately on pre-extracted features to preserve predictive accuracy while minimizing computational cost. Their outputs were combined through ensemble meta-learning (XGBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest) with sample weighting to handle missing data. The final HF prediction probability was obtained by averaging the outputs across the three meta-learners. The proposed framework achieved competitive diagnostic performance, with 98.00% (95% CI: 94.96–99.45%) accuracy, 97.80% (95% CI: 92.28–99.73%) sensitivity, 98.17% (95% CI: 93.53–99.78%) specificity, an F1-score of 97.80% (95% CI: 93.6–99.8%) and an AUC of 0.978 (95% CI: 0.945–0.996) when evaluated against state-of-the-art methods. The results highlight the potential of late-fusion strategies for integrating independently trained modality-specific predictions, offering a feasible approach for HF risk assessment under heterogeneous data availability.