Domain Generalized Medical Landmark Detection via Robust Boundary-Aware Pre-Training

Abstract

In recent years, deep learning has revenue in automated medical landmark detection. Nonetheless, prevailing research in this field predominantly addresses single-center scenarios or domain adaptation settings. In practical environments, the acquisition of multi-center data faces privacy concerns, coupled with the time-intensive and costly nature of data collection and annotation. These challenges substantially impede the broader application of deep learning-based medical landmark detection. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel domain-generalized medical landmark detection framework that relies solely on single-center data for training. Considering the availability of numerous public medical segmentation datasets, we design a simple yet effective method that utilizes single-center segmentation to enhance the domain generalization capabilities of the landmark detection task. Specifically, we introduce a novel boundary-aware pre-training approach to focus the model on regions pertinent to landmarks. To further enhance the robustness and generalization capabilities during pre-training, we have derived a mixing loss term and proved its effectiveness in theory and practice. Extensive experiments conducted on our new domain generalization benchmark for medical landmark detection demonstrate the superiority of our approach.