Multiple landmark detection using multi-agent reinforcement learning

Athanasios Vlontzos, Amir Alansary, Konstantinos Kamnitsas, Daniel Rueckert, Bernhard Kainz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

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-Network (DQN) architecture we construct an environment and agent with implicit inter-communication such that we can accommodate K agents acting and learning simultaneously, while they attempt to detect K different landmarks. During training the agents collaborate by sharing their accumulated knowledge for a collective gain. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art architectures and achieve significantly better accuracy by reducing the detection error by 50%, while requiring fewer computational resources and time to train compared to the naïve approach of training K agents separately. Code and visualizations available: https://github.com/thanosvlo/MARL-for-Anatomical-Landmark-Detection.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2019 - 22nd International Conference, Proceedings
EditorsDinggang Shen, Pew-Thian Yap, Tianming Liu, Terry M. Peters, Ali Khan, Lawrence H. Staib, Caroline Essert, Sean Zhou
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages262-270
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9783030322502
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2019 - Shenzhen, China
Duration: 13 Oct 201917 Oct 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11767 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference22nd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShenzhen
Period13/10/1917/10/19

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Multiple landmark detection using multi-agent reinforcement learning'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this