Hip Landmark Detection With Dependency Mining in Ultrasound Image

Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is a common and serious disease in infants. Hip landmark detection plays a critical role in diagnosing the development of neonatal hip in the ultrasound image. However, the local confusion and the regional weakening make this task challenging. To solve these challenges, we explore the stable hip structure and the distinguishable local features to provide dependencies for hip landmark detection. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture named Dependency Mining ResNet (DM-ResNet), which investigates end-to-end dependency mining for more accurate and much faster hip landmark detection. First of all, we convert the landmark detection to the heatmap estimation by ResNet to build a strong baseline architecture for fast and accurate detection. Secondly, a dependency mining module is explored to mine the dependencies and leverage both the local and global information to decline the local confusion and strengthen the weakening region. Thirdly, we propose a simple but effective local voting algorithm (LVA) that seeks trade-off between long-range and short-range dependencies in the hip ultrasound image. Besides, a dataset with 2000 annotated hip ultrasound images is constructed in our work. It is the first public hip ultrasound dataset for open research. Experimental results show that our method achieves excellent precision in hip landmark detection (average point error of 0.719mm and successful detection rate within 1mm of 79.9%).