Cardiac MRI allows for a comprehensive assessment of myocardial structure, function and tissue characteristics. Here we describe a foundational vision system for cardiac MRI, capable of representing the breadth of human cardiovascular disease and health. Our deep-learning model is trained via self-supervised contrastive learning, in which visual concepts in cine-sequence cardiac MRI scans are learned from the raw text of the accompanying radiology reports. We train and evaluate our model on data from four large academic clinical institutions in the United States. We additionally showcase the performance of our models on the UK BioBank and two additional publicly available external datasets. We explore emergent capabilities of our system and demonstrate remarkable performance across a range of tasks, including the problem of left-ventricular ejection fraction regression and the diagnosis of 39 different conditions such as cardiac amyloidosis and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We show that our deep-learning system is capable of not only contextualizing the staggering complexity of human cardiovascular disease but can be directed towards clinical problems of interest, yielding impressive, clinical-grade diagnostic accuracy with a fraction of the training data typically required for such tasks.
@article{arxiv.2312.00357,
title = {A Generalizable Deep Learning System for Cardiac MRI},
author = {Rohan Shad and Cyril Zakka and Dhamanpreet Kaur and Mrudang Mathur and Robyn Fong and Joseph Cho and Ross Warren Filice and John Mongan and Kimberly Kalianos and Nishith Khandwala and David Eng and Matthew Leipzig and Walter R. Witschey and Alejandro de Feria and Victor A. Ferrari and Euan A. Ashley and Michael A. Acker and Curtis Langlotz and William Hiesinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.00357},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering; Supplementary Appendix available on publisher website. Code: https://github.com/rohanshad/cmr_transformer