Abstract

Foundation models have shown strong transferability in cardiac MRI (CMR), but their effectiveness for heterogeneous multi-view and multi-sequence CMR analysis remains unclear. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of fine-tuning and combining different CMR foundation models for the Universal Multi-Sequence, Multi-Center and Multi-View CMR Segmentation (CMR-Multi) Challenge. CineMA was fine-tuned for cine and late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) segmentation across short-axis and long-axis views. For direct left-ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) estimation, we used two recent frozen CMR foundation models to extract embedding vectors that were then combined using attention-based multiple-instance learning for LVEF regression. In the challenge validation set, cine segmentation achieved Dice scores of 0.862, 0.883, and 0.902 for short-axis, two-chamber and four-chamber cine MRI, respectively. LGE segmentation achieved Dice scores between 0.621 and 0.846 across views. The direct LVEF regression model achieved an MAE of 4.96 percentage points and a Pearson correlation of 0.91. These results indicate that foundation models can be effectively adapted and combined for multi-view CMR analysis, while accurate LGE scar segmentation remains a challenging task.

Links to Paper and Supplementary Materials

Main Paper (Open Access Version): https://papers.miccai.org/miccai-2026-sat/paper/CMRSeg_030.pdf

SharedIt Link: Not yet available

SpringerLink (DOI): Not yet available

Supplementary Material: Not Submitted

Link to Open Review

Open Review Page: https://openreview.net/forum?id=wpoTqCQGLV

BibTex

@InProceedings{AmiSin_Foundation_MICCAISAT2026,
        author = { Amirrajab, Sina AND Scannell, Cian M. AND Vehof, Volker AND Bietenbeck, Michael AND Yilmaz, Ali},
        title = { { Foundation Models Adaptation for Multi-View Multi-modal Cardiac MRI Segmentation and Direct Ejection Fraction Estimation } },
        booktitle = {Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2026 Workshops and Challenges},
        year = {2026},
        publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
        volume = {LNCS 17268},
        month = {pending},
        page = {pending}
}


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