CircleNet for Hip Landmark Detection

Landmark detection plays a critical role in diagnosis of Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip (DDH). Heatmap and anchor-based object detection techniques could obtain reasonable results. However, they have limitations in both robustness and precision given the complexities and inhomogeneity of hip X-ray images. In this paper, we propose a much simpler and more efficient framework called CircleNet to improve the accuracy of landmark detection by predicting landmark and corresponding radius. Using the CircleNet, we not only constrain the relationship between landmarks but also integrate landmark detection and object detection into an end-to-end framework. In order to capture the effective information of the long-range dependency of landmarks in the DDH image, here we propose a new context modeling framework, named the Local Non-Local (LNL) block. The LNL block has the benefits of both non-local block and lightweight computation. We construct a professional DDH dataset for the first time and evaluate our CircleNet on it. The dataset has the largest number of DDH X-ray images in the world to our knowledge. Our results show that the CircleNet can achieve the state-of-the-art results for landmark detection on the dataset with a large margin of 1.8 average pixels compared to current methods. The dataset and source code will be publicly available.