Accurately identifying anatomical landmarks is a crucial step in deformation
analysis and surgical planning for craniomaxillofacial (CMF) bones. Available
methods require segmentation of the object of interest for precise landmarking.
Unlike those, our purpose in this study is to perform anatomical landmarking
using the inherent relation of CMF bones without explicitly segmenting them. We
propose a new deep network architecture, called relational reasoning network
(RRN), to accurately learn the local and the global relations of the landmarks.
Specifically, we are interested in learning landmarks in CMF region: mandible,
maxilla, and nasal bones. The proposed RRN works in an end-to-end manner,
utilizing learned relations of the landmarks based on dense-block units and
without the need for segmentation. For a given a few landmarks as input, the
proposed system accurately and efficiently localizes the remaining landmarks on
the aforementioned bones. For a comprehensive evaluation of RRN, we used
cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans of 250 patients. The proposed system
identifies the landmark locations very accurately even when there are severe
pathologies or deformations in the bones. The proposed RRN has also revealed
unique relationships among the landmarks that help us infer several reasoning
about informativeness of the landmark points. RRN is invariant to order of
landmarks and it allowed us to discover the optimal configurations (number and
location) for landmarks to be localized within the object of interest
(mandible) or nearby objects (maxilla and nasal). To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first of its kind algorithm finding anatomical relations of the
objects using deep learning.Comment: 10 pages, 6 Figures, 3 Table