Which Images To Label for Few-Shot Medical Landmark Detection?

The success of deep learning methods relies on the availability of well-labeled large-scale datasets. However, for medical images, annotating such abundant training data often requires experienced radiologists and consumes their limited time. Few-shot learning is developed to alleviate this burden, which achieves competitive performance with only several labeled data. However, a crucial yet previously overlooked problem in few-shot learning is about the selection of the template images for annotation before learning, which affects the final performance. We herein propose a novel Sample Choosing Policy (SCP) to select "the most worthy" images as the templates, in the context of medical landmark detection. SCP consists of three parts: 1) Self-supervised training for building a pre-trained deep model to extract features from radiological images, 2) Key Point Proposal for localizing informative patches, and 3) Representative Score Estimation for searching most representative samples or templates. The performance of SCP is demonstrated by various experiments on several widely-used public datasets. For one-shot medical landmark detection, the mean radial errors on Cephalometric and HandXray datasets are reduced from 3.595mm to 3.083mm and 4.114mm to 2.653mm, respectively.