Development of an artificial intelligence-based method for the diagnosis of the severity of myxomatous mitral valve disease from canine chest radiographs

An algorithm based on artificial intelligence (AI) was developed and tested to classify different stages of myxomatous mitral valve disease (MMVD) from canine thoracic radiographs. The radiographs were selected from the medical databases of two different institutions, considering dogs over 6 years of age that had undergone chest X-ray and echocardiographic examination. Only radiographs clearly showing the cardiac silhouette were considered. The convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained on both the right and left lateral and/or ventro-dorsal or dorso-ventral views. Each dog was classified according to the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) guidelines as stage B1, B2 or C + D. ResNet18 CNN was used as a classification network, and the results were evaluated using confusion matrices, receiver operating characteristic curves, and t-SNE and UMAP projections. The area under the curve (AUC) showed good heart-CNN performance in determining the MMVD stage from the lateral views with an AUC of 0.87, 0.77, and 0.88 for stages B1, B2, and C + D, respectively. The high accuracy of the algorithm in predicting the MMVD stage suggests that it could stand as a useful support tool in the interpretation of canine thoracic radiographs.