Semi-Supervised Landmark Tracking in Echocardiography Video via Spatial-Temporal Co-Training and Perception-Aware Attention.

Abstract

Precise landmark annotation in cardiac ultrasound images is fundamental for quantitative cardiac health assessment. However, the time-intensive nature of manual annotation typically constrains clinicians to annotate only selected key frames, limiting comprehensive temporal analysis capabilities. While recent automated landmark detection methods have demonstrated success for key-frame analysis, they fail to effectively utilize the intrinsic temporal information across cardiac sequence. To bridge this gap, we present SemiEchoTracker, a novel semi-supervised framework that enables comprehensive landmark tracking throughout echocardiography sequences while requiring supervision only on key frames. Our framework introduces three key innovative strategies: 1) a co-training mechanism that enforces mutual consistency between spatial detection and temporal tracking, enabling accurate intermediate frame detection without additional annotations, 2) a guided DINOv2 pretraining strategy that is specially tailored for extracting fine-grained echocardiography-specific spatial features, and 3) a perception-aware spatial-temporal (PAST) attention module that efficiently captures inter- and intra-frame relationships in echocardiography videos. Extensive validation on three datasets across multiple cardiac views demonstrates that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on the keyframes but also yields accurate frame-by-frame prediction, which is important for dynamic cardiac analysis in clinicians.