DenseSeg: joint learning for semantic segmentation and landmark detection using dense image-to-shape representation.

PURPOSE: Semantic segmentation and landmark detection are fundamental tasks of medical image processing, facilitating further analysis of anatomical objects. Although deep learning-based pixel-wise classification has set a new-state-of-the-art for segmentation, it falls short in landmark detection, a strength of shape-based approaches.

METHODS

In this work, we propose a dense image-to-shape representation that enables the joint learning of landmarks and semantic segmentation by employing a fully convolutional architecture. Our method intuitively allows the extraction of arbitrary landmarks due to its representation of anatomical correspondences. We benchmark our method against the state-of-the-art for semantic segmentation (nnUNet), a shape-based approach employing geometric deep learning and a convolutional neural network-based method for landmark detection.

RESULTS

We evaluate our method on two medical datasets: one common benchmark featuring the lungs, heart, and clavicle from thorax X-rays, and another with 17 different bones in the paediatric wrist. While our method is on par with the landmark detection baseline in the thorax setting (error in mm of 2.6 ± 0.9 vs. 2.7 ± 0.9 ), it substantially surpassed it in the more complex wrist setting ( 1.1 ± 0.6 vs. 1.9 ± 0.5 ).

CONCLUSION

We demonstrate that dense geometric shape representation is beneficial for challenging landmark detection tasks and outperforms previous state-of-the-art using heatmap regression. While it does not require explicit training on the landmarks themselves, allowing for the addition of new landmarks without necessitating retraining.