Deep Geodesic Learning for Segmentation and Anatomical Landmarking

In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework for anatomy segmentation and automatic landmarking. 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 the first step, we propose a deep neural network architecture with carefully designed regularization, and network hyper-parameters to perform image segmentation without the need for data augmentation and complex post-processing refinement. In the second step, we formulate the landmark localization problem directly on the geodesic space for sparsely-spaced anatomical landmarks. In the third step, we utilize a long short-term memory network to identify the closely-spaced landmarks, which is rather difficult to obtain using other standard networks. The proposed fully automated method showed superior efficacy compared to the state-of-the-art mandible segmentation and landmarking approaches in craniofacial anomalies and diseased states. We used a very challenging CBCT data set of 50 patients with a high-degree of craniomaxillofacial variability that is realistic in clinical practice. The qualitative visual inspection was conducted for distinct CBCT scans from 250 patients with high anatomical variability. We have also shown the state-of-the-art performance in an independent data set from the MICCAI Head-Neck Challenge (2015).