Landmark Detection for Medical Images using a General-purpose Segmentation Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Stansfield, Ekaterina, Mitterer, Jennifer A., Altahhan, Abdulrahman
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Stansfield, Ekaterina
Mitterer, Jennifer A.
Altahhan, Abdulrahman
author_facet Stansfield, Ekaterina
Mitterer, Jennifer A.
Altahhan, Abdulrahman
contents Radiographic images are a cornerstone of medical diagnostics in orthopaedics, with anatomical landmark detection serving as a crucial intermediate step for information extraction. General-purpose foundational segmentation models, such as SAM (Segment Anything Model), do not support landmark segmentation out of the box and require prompts to function. However, in medical imaging, the prompts for landmarks are highly specific. Since SAM has not been trained to recognize such landmarks, it cannot generate accurate landmark segmentations for diagnostic purposes. Even MedSAM, a medically adapted variant of SAM, has been trained to identify larger anatomical structures, such as organs and their parts, and lacks the fine-grained precision required for orthopaedic pelvic landmarks. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging another general-purpose, non-foundational model: YOLO. YOLO excels in object detection and can provide bounding boxes that serve as input prompts for SAM. While YOLO is efficient at detection, it is significantly outperformed by SAM in segmenting complex structures. In combination, these two models form a reliable pipeline capable of segmenting not only a small pilot set of eight anatomical landmarks but also an expanded set of 72 landmarks and 16 regions with complex outlines, such as the femoral cortical bone and the pelvic inlet. By using YOLO-generated bounding boxes to guide SAM, we trained the hybrid model to accurately segment orthopaedic pelvic radiographs. Our results show that the proposed combination of YOLO and SAM yields excellent performance in detecting anatomical landmarks and intricate outlines in orthopaedic pelvic radiographs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11551
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Landmark Detection for Medical Images using a General-purpose Segmentation Model
Stansfield, Ekaterina
Mitterer, Jennifer A.
Altahhan, Abdulrahman
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Radiographic images are a cornerstone of medical diagnostics in orthopaedics, with anatomical landmark detection serving as a crucial intermediate step for information extraction. General-purpose foundational segmentation models, such as SAM (Segment Anything Model), do not support landmark segmentation out of the box and require prompts to function. However, in medical imaging, the prompts for landmarks are highly specific. Since SAM has not been trained to recognize such landmarks, it cannot generate accurate landmark segmentations for diagnostic purposes. Even MedSAM, a medically adapted variant of SAM, has been trained to identify larger anatomical structures, such as organs and their parts, and lacks the fine-grained precision required for orthopaedic pelvic landmarks. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging another general-purpose, non-foundational model: YOLO. YOLO excels in object detection and can provide bounding boxes that serve as input prompts for SAM. While YOLO is efficient at detection, it is significantly outperformed by SAM in segmenting complex structures. In combination, these two models form a reliable pipeline capable of segmenting not only a small pilot set of eight anatomical landmarks but also an expanded set of 72 landmarks and 16 regions with complex outlines, such as the femoral cortical bone and the pelvic inlet. By using YOLO-generated bounding boxes to guide SAM, we trained the hybrid model to accurately segment orthopaedic pelvic radiographs. Our results show that the proposed combination of YOLO and SAM yields excellent performance in detecting anatomical landmarks and intricate outlines in orthopaedic pelvic radiographs.
title Landmark Detection for Medical Images using a General-purpose Segmentation Model
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11551