Artificial Intelligence–based Computed Tomography Processing Framework for Surgical Telementoring of Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect, accounting for one-third of all congenital birth defects. As with complicated intracardiac structural abnormalities, CHD is usually treated with surgical repair, and computed tomography (CT) is the main examination method for diagnosis of CHD and also provides anatomical information to surgeons. Currently, there exists a serious shortage of professional surgeons in developing countries. Compared with developed countries where large hospitals and cardiovascular disease centers have professional surgical teams with rich treatment experience, surgeons in developing countries and remote areas suffer from lack of professional surgical skills resulting with low surgical quality and high mortality. Recently, surgical telementoring has been popular to tackle the above problems, in which less-skilled surgeons can get real-time guidance from skilled surgeons remotely through audio and video transmission. However, there still exists difficulties in applying telementoring to CHD surgeries including high resource consumption on medical data transmission and storage, large image noise, and inconvenient and inefficient discussion between surgeons on CT. In this article, we proposed a framework with an image compression module, an image denoising module, and an image segmentation module based on CT images in CHD. We evaluated the above three modules and compared them with existing works, respectively, and the results show that our methods achieve much better performance. Furthermore, with 3D printing, VR technology, and 5G communications, our framework was successfully used in a real case study to treat a patient who needed surgical treatment.