Abstract
3D ultrasound (US) is widely used due to its rich diagnostic information, portability and low cost. Automated standard plane (SP) localization in US volume not only improves efficiency and reduces user-dependence, but also boosts 3D US interpretation. In this study, we propose a novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework to localize multiple uterine SPs in 3D US simultaneously. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we equip the MARL with a one-shot neural architecture search (NAS) module to obtain the optimal agent for each plane. Specifically, Gradient-based search using Differentiable Architecture Sampler (GDAS) is employed to accelerate and stabilize the training process. Second, we propose a novel collaborative strategy to strengthen agents’ communication. Our strategy uses recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn the spatial relationship among SPs effectively. Extensively validated on a large dataset, our approach achieves the accuracy of 7.05\(^{\circ }\)/2.21 mm, 8.62\(^{\circ }\)/2.36 mm and 5.93\(^{\circ }\)/0.89 mm for the mid-sagittal, transverse and coronal plane localization, respectively. The proposed MARL framework can significantly increase the plane localization accuracy and reduce the computational cost and model size.
Y. Huang and X. Yang—Contribute equally to this wok.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the grant from National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2019YFC0118300), Shenzhen Peacock Plan (No. KQTD2016053112051497, KQJSCX20180328095606003) and Medical Scientific Research Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (No. B2018031).
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Huang, Y. et al. (2020). Searching Collaborative Agents for Multi-plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound. In: Martel, A.L., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2020. MICCAI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12263. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59716-0_53
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