3,000 Doppler echocardiography studies for aortic stenosis and mitral regurgitation grading

Overview

This data request supports the training and external validation of a multimodal classification network designed to grade the severity of left-sided valvular heart disease — specifically aortic stenosis (AS) and mitral regurgitation (MR) — directly from raw echocardiographic cine loops combined with spectral and color Doppler frames. Accurate automated grading would reduce inter-reader variability and accelerate triage in high-volume cardiology laboratories. Required acquisitions include parasternal long-axis (PLAX) and parasternal short-axis (PSAX) cine loops at the level of the aortic valve, continuous-wave (CW) Doppler tracings across the aortic valve, and color Doppler overlays of the mitral valve from the apical 4-chamber view. Pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler recordings at the left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) are also required to enable computation of the dimensionless velocity index and aortic valve area by the continuity equation. Frame rate for B-mode cine loops should be at least 30 fps; Doppler sweeps should capture a minimum of three consecutive cardiac cycles at a standard sweep speed of 100 mm/s. DICOM format is mandatory for all modalities so that embedded Doppler velocity scale metadata, depth setting, and Nyquist limit can be extracted programmatically during preprocessing. Each study must be accompanied by a clinical label indicating AS severity categorized as none, mild, moderate, or severe per the 2014 AHA/ACC guideline criteria — specifically mean gradient, peak velocity, and aortic valve area — and MR grade categorized as none, mild, moderate, or severe per effective regurgitant orifice area (EROA) quantification or qualitative color jet area assessment. Studies with concurrent moderate-to-severe tricuspid regurgitation should be flagged to support multi-label classification experiments. Pulmonary artery systolic pressure estimated from peak tricuspid regurgitation velocity is requested as a supplementary hemodynamic label. Hospitals are encouraged to include studies spanning the full severity spectrum; a roughly balanced distribution across severity grades is preferred, with a minimum of 150 studies per severity class per valve disease. Inclusion of serial studies from patients following transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) or surgical mitral valve repair provides longitudinal value and should be pseudonymously linked. Full de-identification compliant with DICOM PS3.15 Annex E Basic Application Level Confidentiality Profile, including removal of institution name, referring physician, and device serial number tags, is required before any transfer.

Progress

Data Specifications

Use Cases

• Training and validating Medical imaging AI/ML models
• Benchmarking Medical imaging detection and segmentation algorithms
• Building de-identified Medical imaging research datasets for academic studies
• Augmenting existing Medical imaging datasets to reduce class imbalance