Abstract
BACKGROUND: Reliable measurement of left ventricular mass (LVM) in echocardiography is essential for early detection of left ventricular dysfunction, coronary artery disease, and arrhythmia risk, yet growing patient volumes have created critical shortage of experts in echocardiography. Recent deep learning approaches reduce inter-operator variability but require large, fully labeled datasets for each standard view-an impractical demand in many clinical settings. METHODS: To overcome these limitations, we propose a heatmap-based point-estimation segmentation model trained via model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) for few-shot LVM quantification across multiple echocardiographic views. Our framework adapts rapidly to new views by learning a shared representation and view-specific head performing K inner-loop updates, and then meta-updating in the outer loop. We used the EchoNet-LVH dataset for the PLAX view, the TMED-2 dataset for the PSAX view and the CAMUS dataset for both the apical 2-chamber and apical 4-chamber views under 1-, 5-, and 10-shot scenarios. RESULTS: As a result, the proposed MAML methods demonstrated comparable performance using mean distance error, mean angle error, successful distance error and spatial angular similarity in a few-shot setting compared to models trained with larger labeled datasets for each view of the echocardiogram.