We present an automated method for localizing an anatomical landmark in three-dimensional medical images. The method combines two recurrent neural networks in a coarse-to-fine approach: The first network determines a candidate neighborhood by analyzing the complete given image volume. The second network localizes the actual landmark precisely and accurately in the candidate neighborhood. Both networks take advantage of multi-dimensional gated recurrent units in their main layers, which allow for high model complexity with a comparatively small set of parameters. We localize the medullopontine sulcus in 3D magnetic resonance images of the head and neck. We show that the proposed approach outperforms similar localization techniques both in terms of mean distance in millimeters and voxels w.r.t. manual labelings of the data. With a mean localization error of 1.7 mm, the proposed approach performs on par with neurological experts, as we demonstrate in an interrater comparison.
University of Oulu(奥卢大学);Oulu University Hospital(奥卢大学医院);Aalto University(阿尔托大学)
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 provi…
landmarker: a Toolkit for Anatomical Landmark Localization in 2D/3D Images
IDLab;Department of Electronics and Information Systems(电子与信息系统系);Ghent University(根特大学);imec;Biometrics Research Group(生物识别研究组);Department of Morphology, Imaging, Orthopedics, Rehabilitation and Nutrition(解剖学、成像、骨科、康复和营养系)
Automatic Landmark-Based Segmentation of Human Subcortical Structures in MRI
École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS)(埃克塞尔技术高等学院);Boston University School of Medicine(波士顿大学医学学院);Signal and Smart Systems Lab (L3S)(信号与智能系统实验室);National School of Engineering of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar(突尼斯国家工程学院,突尼斯El Manar大学)
National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), National Institutes of Health (NIH)(美国国立卫生研究院(NIH)国立牙科与颅面研究所(NIDCR));University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine(南达科他大学桑福德医学院);University of Central Florida(中佛罗里达大学)
In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework for anatomy segmentation and automatic landmark- ing. Specifically, we focus on the challenging problem of mandible segmentation from cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans and identification of 9 anatomical landmarks of the mandible on the geodesic space. The overall approach employs three inter-related steps. In step 1, we propose a deep neu- ral network architecture with carefully designed regularization, and network hyper-parameters to perform image segmentation without the need for data augmentation and complex post- processing…
PAL-Net: A Point-Wise CNN with Patch-Attention for 3D Facial Landmark Localization
Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.(电子、信息与生物工程系,米兰理工学院,米兰,意大利);Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.(健康生物医学科学系,米兰大学,米兰,意大利);U.O. Laboratory of Applied Morphology, IRCCS Policlinico San Donato, 20097 San Donato Milanese, Italy.(应用形态学实验室,IRCCS圣丹诺多临床医院,意大利);Department of Biomedical, Surgical and Dental Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.(生物医学、外科和牙科学系,米兰大学,米兰,意大利)
This paper presents a new approach for integrating semantic information for vision-based vehicle navigation. Although vision-based vehicle navigation systems using pre-mapped visual landmarks are capable of achieving submeter level accuracy in large-scale urban environment, a typical error source in this type of systems comes from the presence of visual landmarks or features from temporal objects in the environment, such as cars and pedestrians. We propose a gated factor graph framework to use semantic information associated with visual features to make decisions on outlier/ inlier computation…
Graz University of Technology(格拉茨工业大学);Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Clinical Forensic Imaging(路德维希·玻尔兹曼临床法医成像研究所)
In many medical image analysis applications, often only a limited amount of training data is available, which makes training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) challenging. In this work on anatomical landmark localization, we propose a CNN architecture that learns to split the localization task into two simpler sub-problems, reducing the need for large training datasets. Our fully convolutional SpatialConfiguration-Net (SCN) dedicates one component to locally accurate but ambiguous candidate predictions, while the other component improves robustness to ambiguities by incorporating the spa…
Southern University of Science and Technology(南方科技大学);The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Air Force Medical Center, PLA(中国人民解放军空军特色医学中心)
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, …
CoMLP: Cooperatively-Gated MLPs for Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Information Fusion in Medical Image Segmentation
Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学转化医学研究院);Zhongguancun Academy(中关村学院);Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence(中关村人工智能研究院);School of Computer Science, the University of Sydney(悉尼大学计算机学院);China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd.(中国联合网络通信集团有限公司)
Graz University of Technology(格拉茨理工大学);Medical University of Graz(格拉茨医科大学);The University of Auckland(奥克兰大学)
In landmark localization, due to ambiguities in defining their exact position, landmark annotations may suffer from large observer variabilities, which result in uncertain annotations. To model the annotation ambiguities of the training dataset, we propose to learn anisotropic Gaussian parameters modeling the shape of the target heatmap during optimization. Furthermore, our method models the prediction uncertainty of individual samples by fitting anisotropic Gaussian functions to the predicted heatmaps during inference. Besides state-of-the-art results, our experiments on datasets of hand radi…
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学);Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学苏州高等研究院)
Detecting anatomical landmarks in medical images plays an essential role in understanding the anatomy and planning automated processing. In recent years, a variety of deep neural network methods have been developed to detect landmarks automatically. However, all of those methods are unary in the sense that a highly specialized network is trained for a single task say associated with a particular anatomical region. In this work, for the first time, we investigate the idea of "You Only Learn Once (YOLO)" and develop a universal anatomical landmark detection model to realize multiple landmark det…
Rethinking Medical Landmark Localization with Prototype Learning-based Progressive Offset Correction
Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心);Boston Children’s Hospital(波士顿儿童医院);Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University(深圳大学人工智能学院);School of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, Nanjing Medical University(南京医科大学生物医学工程与信息学院);National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data System Computing Technology, Shenzhen University(深圳大学大数据系统计算技术国家工程实验室)
Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Nanfang Medical University(南方医科大学);The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学)
Volumetric ultrasound has great potentials in promoting prenatal examinations. Automated solutions are highly desired to efficiently and effectively analyze the massive volumes. Segmentation and landmark localization are two key techniques in making the quantitative evaluation of prenatal ultrasound volumes available in clinic. However, both tasks are non-trivial when considering the poor image quality, boundary ambiguity and anatomical variations in volumetric ultrasound. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for simultaneous segmentation and landmark localization in prenatal ultra…
the Ohio State University(俄亥俄州立大学);Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学);United States Air Force(美国空军);University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校);SOVE Inc(SOVE公司);ShanghaiTech University(上海科技大学)
Accurately segmenting teeth and identifying the corresponding anatomical landmarks on dental mesh models are essential in computer-aided orthodontic treatment. Manually performing these two tasks is time-consuming, tedious, and, more importantly, highly dependent on orthodontists' experiences due to the abnormality and large-scale variance of patients' teeth. Some machine learning-based methods have been designed and applied in the orthodontic field to automatically segment dental meshes (e.g., intraoral scans). In contrast, the number of studies on tooth landmark localization is still limited…
Canon Medical Research Europe(佳能医疗欧洲研究中心);Queen Elizabeth University Hospital(伊丽莎白女王大学医院);University of Glasgow(格拉斯哥大学)
We present an efficient neural network method for locating anatomical landmarks in 3D medical CT scans, using atlas location autocontext in order to learn long-range spatial context. Location predictions are made by regression to Gaussian heatmaps, one heatmap per landmark. This system allows patchwise application of a shallow network, thus enabling multiple volumetric heatmaps to be predicted concurrently without prohibitive GPU memory requirements. Further, the system allows inter-landmark spatial relationships to be exploited using a simple overdetermined affine mapping that is robust to de…
The University of Hong Kong(香港大学);ShanghaiTech University(上海科技大学);Max Planck Institute for Informatics(马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所);South China University of Technology(华南理工大学)
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…
Aortic root landmark localization with optimal transport loss for heatmap regression
Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Meiji University(明治大学先端数学研究所);The Jikei University School of Medicine(慈惠医科大学);Sendai Kousei Hospital(仙台厚生病院);School of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences, Meiji University(明治大学跨学科数学学部)
3D ultrasound (US) can facilitate detailed prenatal examinations for fetal growth monitoring. To analyze a 3D US volume, it is fundamental to identify anatomical landmarks of the evaluated organs accurately. Typical deep learning methods usually regress the coordinates directly or involve heatmap-matching. However, these methods struggle to deal with volumes with large sizes and the highly-varying positions and orientations of fetuses. In this work, we exploit an object detection framework to detect landmarks in 3D fetal facial US volumes. By regressing multiple parameters of the landmark-cent…
3D anatomical landmarks play an important role in health research. Their automated prediction/localization thus becomes a vital task. In this paper, we introduce a deformation method for 3D anatomical landmarks prediction. It utilizes a source model with anatomical landmarks which are annotated by clinicians, and deforms this model non-rigidly to match the target model. Two constraints are introduced in the optimization, which are responsible for alignment and smoothness, respectively. Experiments are performed on our dataset and the results demonstrate the robustness of our method, and show t…
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,…
Zuse Institute Berlin(柏林祖斯研究所);University of Zurich(苏黎世大学);Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学);Freie Universität Berlin(柏林自由大学)
Statistical shape modeling aims at capturing shape variations of an anatomical structure that occur within a given population. Shape models are employed in many tasks, such as shape reconstruction and image segmentation, but also shape generation and classification. Existing shape priors either require dense correspondence between training examples or lack robustness and topological guarantees. We present FlowSSM, a novel shape modeling approach that learns shape variability without requiring dense correspondence between training instances. It relies on a hierarchy of continuous deformation fl…
Automatic anatomical landmark localization has made great strides by leveraging deep learning methods in recent years. The ability to quantify the uncertainty of these predictions is a vital component needed for these methods to be adopted in clinical settings, where it is imperative that erroneous predictions are caught and corrected. We propose Quantile Binning, a data-driven method to categorize predictions by uncertainty with estimated error bounds. Our framework can be applied to any continuous uncertainty measure, allowing straightforward identification of the best subset of predictions …
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学)
Localization of anatomical landmarks is essential for clinical diagnosis, treatment planning, and research. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network, named feature aggregation and refinement network (FARNet), for the automatic detection of anatomical landmarks. To alleviate the problem of limited training data in the medical domain, our network adopts a deep network pre-trained on natural images as the backbone network and several popular networks have been compared. Our FARNet also includes a multi-scale feature aggregation module for multi-scale feature fusion and a feature refinement …
Research Institute for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence, sinc(i)(信号、系统与计算智能研究所);CONICET(国家科学技术研究委员会);Universidad Nacional del Litoral(国立滨海大学)
In this work we address the problem of landmark-based segmentation for anatomical structures. We propose HybridGNet, an encoder-decoder neural architecture which combines standard convolutions for image feature encoding, with graph convolutional neural networks to decode plausible representations of anatomical structures. We benchmark the proposed architecture considering other standard landmark and pixel-based models for anatomical segmentation in chest x-ray images, and found that HybridGNet is more robust to image occlusions. We also show that it can be used to construct landmark-based segm…
Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学);Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey(罗格斯大学,新泽西州立大学)
Due to its excellent performance, U-Net is the most widely used backbone architecture for biomedical image segmentation in the recent years. However, in our studies, we observe that there is a considerable performance drop in the case of detecting smaller anatomical landmarks with blurred noisy boundaries. We analyze this issue in detail, and address it by proposing an over-complete architecture (Ki-Net) which involves projecting the data onto higher dimensions (in the spatial sense). This network, when augmented with U-Net, results in significant improvements in the case of segmenting small a…
Imperial College London(伦敦帝国理工学院);King’s College London(伦敦国王学院)
We propose a new Patch-based Iterative Network (PIN) for fast and accurate landmark localisation in 3D medical volumes. PIN utilises a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn the spatial relationship between an image patch and anatomical landmark positions. During inference, patches are repeatedly passed to the CNN until the estimated landmark position converges to the true landmark location. PIN is computationally efficient since the inference stage only selectively samples a small number of patches in an iterative fashion rather than a dense sampling at every location in the volume. Our …
CheXmask-U: Quantifying uncertainty in landmark-based anatomical segmentation for X-ray images
Laboratory of Applied Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Computer Sciences, CONICET - Universidad de Buenos Aires(应用人工智能实验室,计算机科学研究所,CONICET - 华盛顿大学布宜诺斯艾利斯分校);Weizmann Institute of Science(科学研究所);APOLO Biotech(APOLO生物技术);Research Institute for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence, sinc(i), CONICET - Universidad Nacional del Litoral(信号、系统和计算智能研究 institute,sinc(i),CONICET - 沿海国立大学)
Kyoto University(京都大学);Tohoku University(东北大学);Tokyo Institute of Technology(东京工业大学);Nagoya University(名古屋大学)
In video-assisted thoracoscopic surgeries, successful procedures of nodule resection are highly dependent on the precise estimation of lung deformation between the inflated lung in the computed tomography (CT) images during preoperative planning and the deflated lung in the treatment views during surgery. Lungs in the pneumothorax state during surgery have a large volume change from normal lungs, making it difficult to build a mechanical model. The purpose of this study is to develop a deformation estimation method of the 3D surface of a deflated lung from a few partial observations. To estima…
Imperial College London(帝国理工学院);MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences(MRC伦敦医学科学研究所);National Heart and Lung Institute(国家心肺研究所)
Deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image segmentation. However, most approaches have focused on learning image intensity features for segmentation, whereas the incorporation of anatomical shape priors has received less attention. In this paper, we combine a multi-task deep learning approach with atlas propagation to develop a shape-constrained bi-ventricular segmentation pipeline for short-axis CMR volumetric images. The pipeline first employs a fully convolutional network (FCN) that learns segmentation and landmark localisat…
Mask-HybridGNet: Graph-based segmentation with emergent anatomical correspondence from pixel-level supervision
Biomedical Image Technologies, ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain(生物医学影像技术,电信工程学院,马德里理工大学,马德里,西班牙);IHU PRISM National Precision Medicine Center in Oncology, Cancer Data Science Unit, CentraleSupélec, Gustave Roussy, INSERM, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France(IHU PRISM国家精准医学中心(肿瘤学),癌症数据科学单元,中央圣艾尔布兰,格斯塔夫·罗西,国家医学研究所,巴黎-萨克雷大学,法国)
Coordinated Transformer with Position \& Sample-aware Central Loss for Anatomical Landmark Detection
Case Western Reserve University(凯斯西储大学);The Second Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University(安徽医科大学第二附属医院);Institute of Orthopaedics, Research Center for Translational Medicine, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University(安徽医科大学第二附属医院骨科研究所、转化医学研究中心);China University of Petroleum(中国石油大学);Guangzhou Twelfth people’s Hospital(广州市第十二人民医院);Guangzhou Occupational Disease Prevention and Treatment Hospital(广州市职业病防治院);Guangzhou Otolaryngology-head and Neck Surgery Hospital(广州市耳鼻咽喉头颈外科医院);West China Hospital(华西医院);Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University(武汉大学人民医院)
Anatomical landmarks are a crucial prerequisite for many medical imaging tasks. Usually, the set of landmarks for a given task is predefined by experts. The landmark locations for a given image are then annotated manually or via machine learning methods trained on manual annotations. In this paper, in contrast, we present a method to automatically discover and localize anatomical landmarks in medical images. Specifically, we consider landmarks that attract the visual attention of humans, which we term visually salient landmarks. We illustrate the method for fetal neurosonographic images. First…
UAE: Universal Anatomical Embedding on Multi-modality Medical Images
National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University(西北工业大学计算机科学与工程学院,空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室);Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学电子工程系);Beijing United Family Hospital(北京和睦家医院);The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University(浙江大学医学院附属第一医院);Peking Union Medical College Hospital(北京协和医院)
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah(犹他大学科学计算与成像研究所);School of Computing, University of Utah(犹他大学计算学院)
Statistical shape analysis is a very useful tool in a wide range of medical and biological applications. However, it typically relies on the ability to produce a relatively small number of features that can capture the relevant variability in a population. State-of-the-art methods for obtaining such anatomical features rely on either extensive preprocessing or segmentation and/or significant tuning and post-processing. These shortcomings limit the widespread use of shape statistics. We propose that effective shape representations should provide sufficient information to align/register images. …
Structure-Guided Self-Supervised Matching for One-Shot Medical Landmark Detection
Department of Computer Science(计算机科学系);Renmin University of China(中国人民大学);University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学);School of Biomedical Engineering(生物医学工程学院);School of Artificial Intelligence(人工智能学院);Shanghai Jiaotong University(上海交通大学);Department of Orthopedics(骨科系);Affiliated Hospital of Guizhou Medical University(贵州医科大学附属医院);Yale University(耶鲁大学)
LmPT: Conditional Point Transformer for Anatomical Landmark Detection on 3D Point Clouds
Mines Paris - PSL University, Centre for material sciences (MAT)(巴黎 Mines - PSL 大学材料科学中心);Mines Paris - PSL University, Centre for mathematical morphology (CMM)(巴黎 Mines - PSL 大学数学形态学中心);Mines Paris - PSL University, Centre for material forming (CEMEF)(巴黎 Mines - PSL 大学材料成形中心);The National Veterinary School of Alfort (EnvA)(阿尔福国家兽医学校)
University of Central Florida(中佛罗里达大学);Ther-AI, LLC(Ther-AI有限责任公司);National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), National Institutes of Health (NIH)(美国国立卫生研究院下属国立牙科与颅面研究所);Boston Children’s Hospital(波士顿儿童医院);Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);Northwestern University(西北大学);Sheikh Zyed Children’s Hospital(谢赫·扎耶德儿童医院);George Washington University(乔治·华盛顿大学)
Purpose: We perform anatomical landmarking for craniomaxillofacial (CMF) bones without explicitly segmenting them. Towards this, we propose a new simple yet efficient deep network architecture, called \textit{relational reasoning network (RRN)}, to accurately learn the local and the global relations among the landmarks in CMF bones; specifically, mandible, maxilla, and nasal bones. Approach: The proposed RRN works in an end-to-end manner, utilizing learned relations of the landmarks based on dense-block units. For a given few landmarks as input, RRN treats the landmarking process similar to a …
The detection of anatomical landmarks is a vital step for medical image analysis and applications for diagnosis, interpretation and guidance. Manual annotation of landmarks is a tedious process that requires domain-specific expertise and introduces inter-observer variability. This paper proposes a new detection approach for multiple landmarks based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our hypothesis is that the position of all anatomical landmarks is interdependent and non-random within the human anatomy, thus finding one landmark can help to deduce the location of others. Using a Deep Q-Net…
H3DE-Net: Efficient and Accurate 3D Landmark Detection in Medical Imaging
School of Computer Science USTC(计算机科学学院 中国科学技术大学);School of Computer Science(计算机科学学院);Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学);ShanghaiTech University(上海科技大学);Sciences College(科学学院);School of Information Science, NENU(信息科学学院 南京师范大学);Technical University of Munich (TUM)(慕尼黑技术大学);Stanford University(斯坦福大学)
FM-OSD: Foundation Model-Enabled One-Shot Detection of Anatomical Landmarks
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Massachusetts General Hospital(麻省总医院);Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab(华为诺亚方舟实验室);Massachusetts General Brigham(麻省总医院布里格姆医疗系统);Institute of Medical Intelligence and XR, The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学医学智能与XR研究所)
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 anatomic…
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学)
Accurate anatomical landmark detection plays an increasingly vital role in medical image analysis. Although existing methods achieve satisfying performance, they are mostly based on CNN and specialized for a single domain say associated with a particular anatomical region. In this work, we propose a universal model for multi-domain landmark detection by taking advantage of transformer for modeling long dependencies and develop a domain-adaptive transformer model, named as DATR, which is trained on multiple mixed datasets from different anatomies and capable of detecting landmarks of any image …
HYATT-Net is Grand: A Hybrid Attention Network for Performant Anatomical Landmark Detection
Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)(中国科学技术大学苏州高等研究院);School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)(中国科学技术大学计算机科学与技术学院);School of Information Science and Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT)(宁波东方理工大学信息科学与技术学院);Stanford University(斯坦福大学)
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 frame…