Siemens Healthineers announced yesterday that its ACUSON Origin AI-powered cardiovascular ultrasound system has received FDA clearance. The system comes equipped with the new AcuNav Lumos 4D ICE (intracardiac echocardiography) catheter.

“In echo, we make a lot of different measurements from chamber size to velocity profiles and tracing of ventricles for Efs, and strain measurements,” Michael Snyder, global cardiology marketing manager for Ultrasound at Siemens Healthineers, told HCB News. “Our echocardiographers need to be able to focus on the patient and the images they’re seeing and worry less about operating the system.”

The ACUSON Origin can provide measurements, view recognition, and imaging assistance during cardiac procedures. It’s able to do all of that because its AI tools were trained using one of the world's largest image databases, which contains more than two billion annotated images.
For transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) and transesophageal echocardiography (TEE), the system is capable of generating 5,600 AI-powered measurements. In addition to that, it's also the first system that can provide real-time cardiac recognition.

Its AI Assist tool can be used during TTE to recognize cardiac structures and automatically position color and spectral Doppler regions of interest. It has a 99% accuracy rate for proper view classification and Doppler placement on 23 anatomical and hemodynamic targets for 12 standard echocardiogram views.

“The moment you place the transducer on the patient’s chest, the system knows what it’s looking at,” explained Snyder. “It knows all the chambers of the heart, every valve of the heart, and pulmonary veins in the heart for the standard window for a TTE.”

With the 2D and 4D HeartAI features, the system can also automatically contour and quantify all four cardiac chambers without requiring an ECG. 4D HeartAI has a 98% accuracy rate for multiplanar reconstruction (MPR) identification and alignment.

The 2D HeartAI can perform auto tracking on contrast images, making it the first commercially available system with that capability. It has been shown to have a 99% accuracy rate for detecting left-ventricular end-diastolic volume and left-ventricular end-systolic volume.

“AI, in general, is not only making exams faster by reducing the amount of hand interaction with the system, it is also reducing that interoperator variability for the measurements made,” said Snyder. “No matter who makes measurements of ventricle size, spectral Doppler velocities, it’s all going to be the same because you’ve got that same intelligence within the AI making those measurements for you.”

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