Follow Your Heart: Landmark-Guided Transducer Pose Scoring for Point-of-Care Echocardiography

Point-of-care transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) makes it possible to assess a patient's cardiac function in almost any setting. A critical step in the TTE exam is acquisition of the apical 4-chamber (A4CH) view, which is used to evaluate clinically impactful measurements such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). However, optimizing transducer pose for high-quality image acquisition and subsequent measurement is a challenging task, particularly for novice users. In this work, we present a multi-task network that provides feedback cues for A4CH view acquisition and automatically estimates LVEF in high-quality A4CH images. The network cascades a transducer pose scoring module and an uncertainty-aware LV landmark detector with automated LVEF estimation. A strength is that network training and inference do not require cumbersome or costly setups for transducer position tracking. We evaluate performance on point-of-care TTE data acquired with a spatially dense "sweep" protocol around the optimal A4CH view. The results demonstrate the network's ability to determine when the transducer pose is on target, close to target, or far from target based on the images alone, while generating visual landmark cues that guide anatomical interpretation and orientation. In conclusion, we demonstrate a promising strategy to provide guidance for A4CH view acquisition, which may be useful when deploying point-of-care TTE in limited resource settings.

Translating Dietary Standards into Healthy Meals with Minimal Substitutions

An important goal for personalized diet systems is to improve nutritional quality without compromising convenience or affordability. We present an end-to-end framework that converts dietary standards into complete meals with minimal change. Using the What We Eat in America (WWEIA) intake data for 135,491 meals, we identify 34 interpretable meal archetypes that we then use to condition a generative model and a portion predictor to meet USDA nutritional targets. In comparisons within archetypes, generated meals are better at following recommended daily intake (RDI) targets by 47.0%, while remaining compositionally close to real meals. Our results show that by allowing one to three food substitutions, we were able to create meals that were 10% more nutritious, while reducing costs 19-32%, on average. By turning dietary guidelines into realistic, budget-aware meals and simple swaps, this framework can underpin clinical decision support, public-health programs, and consumer apps that deliver scalable, equitable improvements in everyday nutrition.