Misshapen Pelvis Landmark Detection With Local-Global Feature Learning for Diagnosing Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip

Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is one of the most common orthopedic disorders in infants and young children. Accurately detecting and identifying the misshapen anatomical landmarks plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of DDH. However, the diversity during the calcification and the deformity due to the dislocation lead it a difficult task to detect the misshapen pelvis landmarks for both human expert and computer. Generally, the anatomical landmarks exhibit stable morphological features in part regions and rigid structural features in long ranges, which can be strong identification for the landmarks. In this paper, we investigate the local morphological features and global structural features for the misshapen landmark detection with a novel Pyramid Non-local UNet (PN-UNet). Firstly, we mine the local morphological features with a series of convolutional neural network (CNN) stacks, and convert the detection of a landmark to the segmentation of the landmark’s local neighborhood by UNet. Secondly, a non-local module is employed to capture the global structural features with high-level structural knowledge. With the end-to-end and accurate detection of pelvis landmarks, we realize a fully automatic and highly reliable diagnosis of DDH. In addition, a dataset with 10,000 pelvis X-ray images is constructed in our work. It is the first public dataset for diagnosing DDH and has been already released for open research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply deep learning method in the diagnosis of DDH. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an excellent precision in landmark detection (average point to point error of 0.9286mm) and illness diagnosis over human experts. Project is available at http://imcc.ustc.edu.cn/project/ddh/.