SPARC: Slice-to-volume Pipeline for Automated Reconstruction of gated 3D+time fetal Cardiac MRI

arXiv:2608.18616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fetal cardiac MRI (fCMR) provides valuable diagnostic information complementary to echocardiography, particularly for complex congenital heart disease (CHD). Dynamic cine imaging captures cardiac motion essential for assessment of cardiac function; however, the reconstruction of 3D+time cine volumes from 2D+time acquired slices remains challenging due to unpredictable fetal motion and the absence of automated and robust processing tools suitable for clinical deployment. We present the SPARC pipeline (Slice-to-volume Pipeline for Automated Reconstruction of gated 3D+time fetal Cardiac MRI) which combines physics-informed slice-to-volume reconstruction (SVR) of Doppler ultrasound (DUS) gated stacks of slices, assisted by deep learning (DL) models for thoracic segmentation and anatomical reorientation. The proposed SVR algorithm achieves a tenfold reduction in reconstruction time relative to existing frame-wise approaches (4.8 pm 1.0 vs 49.0 pm 14.1 min, p < 0.0001) while improving the reconstruction quality. Thoracic segmentation performance using ensemble aggregation exceeded inter-rater agreement (Dice 84.7 pm 3.9% vs 81.4 pm 7.7%, p<0.05), while anatomical reorientation achieved a success rate of 90.1%. End-to-end evaluation on a large held-out clinical cohort (n = 121) demonstrated fully automatic processing in 82.6% of cases with a mean runtime of 7.1 pm 1.3 min, compatible with clinical deployment. The complete SPARC pipeline is publicly available as a Docker container https://hub.docker.com/r/aboutill/sparc and is currently deployed at our institution as a clinical research tool.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-08-20

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