{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,1]],"date-time":"2026-09-01T04:18:20Z","timestamp":1788236300274,"version":"build-2803163510"},"reference-count":21,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,1]],"date-time":"2026-09-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1788220800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Fondo EOC-USI"},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001711","name":"Swiss National Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["224943"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["224943"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001711","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001711","name":"Swiss National Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["228512"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["228512"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001711","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["224943"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["224943"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/00yjd3n13","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["228512"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["228512"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/00yjd3n13","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Bioengineering"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Gaseous microemboli (GME) represent a common complication of cardiac structural interventions across both surgical and transcatheter approaches. Intraoperative transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) represents a convenient methodology to monitor and visualize the presence of circulating GME. However, their detection and quantification are far from trivial due to operator-dependent view, high velocity, and objects with similar structure in the background. Here, we propose a feasibility study based on a 2.5D U-Net architecture to detect GME in space-time connected data. We applied and tested such an architecture on a pilot dataset of eight TEE recordings (60 fps, 600\u00d7800 pixels) from eight different patients undergoing cardiac surgery, resulting in improved detection of moving GMEs against the background with respect to classical spot detection algorithms and 2D U-Net, yet retaining real-time execution speed with respect to more complex deep-learning architectures. Under leave-one-patient-out cross-validation, the selected model achieved strong detection performance under a three-pixel radius-tolerant grace-zone evaluation, with a precision of 92.55% and recall of 80.54%, corresponding to radius-tolerant Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice coefficients of 73.95% and 84.13%, respectively. Complementarily, strict pixel-based segmentation metrics were also computed, yielding an IoU of 41.74% and a Dice coefficient of 57.98%. The selected model achieved an average inference time of 0.12\u00a0s per batch on the tested hardware. To assess specificity on unseen data, we additionally evaluated the model on an external GME-negative TEE dataset, where it produced predominantly empty or near-empty masks, indicating a low rate of spurious detections. These results support the technical feasibility of real-time GME segmentation, although broader clinical validation on larger multi-patient, multicenter datasets is still required.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/bioengineering13091017","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,1]],"date-time":"2026-09-01T03:19:26Z","timestamp":1788232766000},"page":"1017","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Protect the Brain When Treating the Heart: Feasibility of 2.5D U-Net for Real-Time Gaseous Microemboli Detection"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-8525-375X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Andrea","family":"Angino","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Center for Computational Medicine in Cardiology (CCMC), Universit\u00e0 della Svizzera Italiana (USI), 6900 Lugano, Switzerland"},{"name":"Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, UniDistance Suisse, 3900 Brig, Switzerland"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"conceptualization","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"methodology","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-original-draft","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"software","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"formal-analysis","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"validation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"data-curation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"investigation","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5496-9445","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ken","family":"Trotti","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (AMCS), Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi 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Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), 6962 Lugano-Viganello, Switzerland"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"conceptualization","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"data-curation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-original-draft","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"supervision","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"formal-analysis","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"visualization","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"given":"Rolf","family":"Krause","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Center for Computational Medicine in Cardiology (CCMC), Universit\u00e0 della Svizzera Italiana (USI), 6900 Lugano, Switzerland"},{"name":"Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (AMCS), Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi 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