No Arabic abstract
X-ray image guidance enables percutaneous alternatives to complex procedures. Unfortunately, the indirect view onto the anatomy in addition to projective simplification substantially increase the task-load for the surgeon. Additional 3D information such as knowledge of anatomical landmarks can benefit surgical decision making in complicated scenarios. Automatic detection of these landmarks in transmission imaging is challenging since image-domain features characteristic to a certain landmark change substantially depending on the viewing direction. Consequently and to the best of our knowledge, the above problem has not yet been addressed. In this work, we present a method to automatically detect anatomical landmarks in X-ray images independent of the viewing direction. To this end, a sequential prediction framework based on convolutional layers is trained on synthetically generated data of the pelvic anatomy to predict 23 landmarks in single X-ray images. View independence is contingent on training conditions and, here, is achieved on a spherical segment covering (120 x 90) degrees in LAO/RAO and CRAN/CAUD, respectively, centered around AP. On synthetic data, the proposed approach achieves a mean prediction error of 5.6 +- 4.5 mm. We demonstrate that the proposed network is immediately applicable to clinically acquired data of the pelvis. In particular, we show that our intra-operative landmark detection together with pre-operative CT enables X-ray pose estimation which, ultimately, benefits initialization of image-based 2D/3D registration.
Recently, there is an increasing demand for automatically detecting anatomical landmarks which provide rich structural information to facilitate subsequent medical image analysis. Current methods related to this task often leverage the power of deep neural networks, while a major challenge in fine tuning such models in medical applications arises from insufficient number of labeled samples. To address this, we propose to regularize the knowledge transfer across source and target tasks through cross-task representation learning. The proposed method is demonstrated for extracting facial anatomical landmarks which facilitate the diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome. The source and target tasks in this work are face recognition and landmark detection, respectively. The main idea of the proposed method is to retain the feature representations of the source model on the target task data, and to leverage them as an additional source of supervisory signals for regularizing the target model learning, thereby improving its performance under limited training samples. Concretely, we present two approaches for the proposed representation learning by constraining either final or intermediate model features on the target model. Experimental results on a clinical face image dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach works well with few labeled data, and outperforms other compared approaches.
Colonoscopy is a standard imaging tool for visualizing the entire gastrointestinal (GI) tract of patients to capture lesion areas. However, it takes the clinicians excessive time to review a large number of images extracted from colonoscopy videos. Thus, automatic detection of biological anatomical landmarks within the colon is highly demanded, which can help reduce the burden of clinicians by providing guidance information for the locations of lesion areas. In this article, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach to detect biological anatomical landmarks in colonoscopy videos. First, raw colonoscopy video sequences are pre-processed to reject interference frames. Second, a ResNet-101 based network is used to detect three biological anatomical landmarks separately to obtain the intermediate detection results. Third, to achieve more reliable localization of the landmark periods within the whole video period, we propose to post-process the intermediate detection results by identifying the incorrectly predicted frames based on their temporal distribution and reassigning them back to the correct class. Finally, the average detection accuracy reaches 99.75%. Meanwhile, the average IoU of 0.91 shows a high degree of similarity between our predicted landmark periods and ground truth. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of accurately detecting and localizing biological anatomical landmarks from colonoscopy videos.
Well-annotated medical images are costly and sometimes even impossible to acquire, hindering landmark detection accuracy to some extent. Semi-supervised learning alleviates the reliance on large-scale annotated data by exploiting the unlabeled data to understand the population structure of anatomical landmarks. The global shape constraint is the inherent property of anatomical landmarks that provides valuable guidance for more consistent pseudo labelling of the unlabeled data, which is ignored in the previously semi-supervised methods. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic shape-regulated self-training framework for semi-supervised landmark detection by fully considering the global shape constraint. Specifically, to ensure pseudo labels are reliable and consistent, a PCA-based shape model adjusts pseudo labels and eliminate abnormal ones. A novel Region Attention loss to make the network automatically focus on the structure consistent regions around pseudo labels. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms other semi-supervised methods and achieves notable improvement on three medical image datasets. Moreover, our framework is flexible and can be used as a plug-and-play module integrated into most supervised methods to improve performance further.
Automatic and accurate detection of anatomical landmarks is an essential operation in medical image analysis with a multitude of applications. Recent deep learning methods have improved results by directly encoding the appearance of the captured anatomy with the likelihood maps (i.e., heatmaps). However, most current solutions overlook another essence of heatmap regression, the objective metric for regressing target heatmaps and rely on hand-crafted heuristics to set the target precision, thus being usually cumbersome and task-specific. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-to-learn framework for landmark detection to optimize the neural network and the target precision simultaneously. The pivot of this work is to leverage the reinforcement learning (RL) framework to search objective metrics for regressing multiple heatmaps dynamically during the training process, thus avoiding setting problem-specific target precision. We also introduce an early-stop strategy for active termination of the RL agents interaction that adapts the optimal precision for separate targets considering exploration-exploitation tradeoffs. This approach shows better stability in training and improved localization accuracy in inference. Extensive experimental results on two different applications of landmark localization: 1) our in-house prenatal ultrasound (US) dataset and 2) the publicly available dataset of cephalometric X-Ray landmark detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our proposed framework is general and shows the potential to improve the efficiency of anatomical landmark detection.
This paper addresses the challenge of localization of anatomical landmarks in knee X-ray images at different stages of osteoarthritis (OA). Landmark localization can be viewed as regression problem, where the landmark position is directly predicted by using the region of interest or even full-size images leading to large memory footprint, especially in case of high resolution medical images. In this work, we propose an efficient deep neural networks framework with an hourglass architecture utilizing a soft-argmax layer to directly predict normalized coordinates of the landmark points. We provide an extensive evaluation of different regularization techniques and various loss functions to understand their influence on the localization performance. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of transfer learning from low-budget annotations, and experimentally demonstrate that such approach is improving the accuracy of landmark localization. Compared to the prior methods, we validate our model on two datasets that are independent from the train data and assess the performance of the method for different stages of OA severity. The proposed approach demonstrates better generalization performance compared to the current state-of-the-art.