Personalized Graphical Models for Anatomical Landmark Localization in Whole-Body Medical Images

The goal of this work is to accurately and reliably localize anatomical landmarks in 3D Computed Tomography (CT) scans of the upper bodies of cancer patients even in the presence of pathologies and imaging artifacts that may markedly change the appearances of anatomical structures. We propose a method based on dense matching of parts-based graphical models. For landmark localization, we replace population averaged models by personalized models that are adapted to each test image at runtime. We do so by jointly leveraging weighted combinations of labeled training exemplars. We report results for localizing standard anatomical landmarks in clinical 3D CT volumes, using a database of 83 lung cancer patients. We compare our method against both (baseline) population averaged graphical models and against atlas-based deformable registration and show the method is in each case able to localize landmarks with significantly improved reliability and accuracy.