Echocardiogram Foundation Model -- Application 1: Estimating Ejection Fraction

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases stand as the primary global cause of mortality. Among the various imaging techniques available for visualising the heart and evaluating its function, echocardiograms emerge as the preferred choice due to their safety and low cost. Quantifying cardiac function based on echocardiograms is very laborious, time-consuming and subject to high interoperator variability. In this work, we introduce EchoAI, an echocardiogram foundation model, that is trained using self-supervised learning (SSL) on 1.5 million echocardiograms. We evaluate our approach by fine-tuning EchoAI to estimate the ejection fraction achieving a mean absolute percentage error of 9.40%. This level of accuracy aligns with the performance of expert sonographers.