Fetal Cerebellum Landmark Detection Based on 3D MRI: Method and Benchmark.

Abstract

Fetal cerebellum landmark detection is crucial for assessing fetal brain development. Although deep learning has become the standard for automatic landmark detection, most previous methods have focused on using 2D ultrasound or thick Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). To improve accuracy, landmarks should be located on thin 3D MRIs. However, abnormal development, high noise, and fuzzy boundaries in 3D fetal brain images make traditional methods less effective for cerebellum landmark detection. To address this, we introduce the Anatomical Pseudo-label Guided Attention (APGA) network alongside a 3D MRI-based benchmark for fetal cerebellum landmark detection. During training, we use a shared encoder to extract image features and two decoders for landmark regression and anatomical pseudo-label segmentation. We design a Feature Decoupling Transformer (FDT) and embed it into the encoder to better calibrate the features for the two tasks. We only need the encoder, the FDT, and the landmark decoder during the inference phase. Extensive experiments on our proposed benchmark and out-of-domain test set have shown the effectiveness of our method. Our simulations also demonstrated that 3D biometrics are better than 2D biometrics.