Laplacian eigenmaps manifold learning for landmark localization in brain MR images

The identification of anatomical landmarks in medical images is an important task in registration and morphometry. Manual labeling is time consuming and prone to observer errors. We propose a manifold learning procedure, based on Laplacian Eigenmaps, that learns an embedding from patches drawn from multiple brain MR images. The position of the patches in the manifold can be used to predict the location of the landmarks via regression. New images are embedded in the manifold and the resulting coordinates are used to predict the landmark position in the new image. The output of multiple regressors is fused in a weighted fashion to boost the accuracy and robustness. We demonstrate this framework in 3D brain MR images from the ADNI database. We show an accuracy of ~0.5mm, an increase of at least two fold when compared to traditional approaches such as registration or sliding windows.