Autonomous skeletal landmark localization toward agentic C-arm control

Automated C-arm positioning ensures timely treatment in patients requiring emergent interventions. When a conventional deep learning (DL) approach for C-arm control fails, clinicians must revert to manual operation, resulting in additional delays. Consequently, an agentic C-arm control framework based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is highly desirable, as it can incorporate clinician feedback and use reasoning to make adjustments toward more accurate positioning. Skeletal landmark localization is essential for C-arm control, and we investigate adapting MLLMs for autonomous landmark localization.

We used an annotated synthetic X-ray dataset and a real X-ray dataset. Each X-ray in both datasets is paired with several skeletal landmarks. We fine-tuned two MLLMs and tasked them with retrieving the closest landmarks from each X-ray. Quantitative evaluations of landmark localization were performed and compared against a leading DL approach. We further conducted qualitative experiments demonstrating: (1) how an MLLM can correct an initially incorrect prediction through reasoning, and (2) how the MLLM can sequentially navigate the C-arm toward a target location.

On both datasets, fine-tuned MLLMs demonstrate competitive performance across all localization tasks when compared with the DL approach. In the qualitative experiments, the MLLMs provide evidence of reasoning and spatial awareness.

This study shows that fine-tuned MLLMs achieve accurate skeletal landmark localization and hold promise for agentic autonomous C-arm control. Our code is available at https://github.com/marszzibros/C-arm-localization-LLMs.git .