Deep Learning Strain (DLS)

Open-source, vendor-agnostic deep learning pipeline that retrospectively measures left ventricular global longitudinal strain (GLS) from routine apical-4-chamber echocardiography B-mode video, without requiring speckle-tracking software or manual tracing. The pipeline reuses EchoNet-Dynamic's LV semantic-segmentation network to trace the LV endocardial border frame-by-frame, then measures the frame-to-frame change in traced myocardial length across the cardiac cycle to derive GLS. In external validation against a large 3D-echocardiography-derived GLS dataset and a prospective two-sonographer, two-vendor repeated-measures study, the automated strain measurement showed lower inter- and intra-measurement variability than human readers and moderate agreement with reference speckle-tracking strain (ICC 0.58), while being robust to image-quality differences and vendor.