Learning to detect anatomical landmarks of the pelvis in X-rays from arbitrary views

Purpose Minimally invasive alternatives are now available for many complex surgeries. These approaches are enabled by the increasing availability of intra-operative image guidance. Yet, fluoroscopic X-rays suffer from projective transformation and thus cannot provide direct views onto anatomy. Surgeons could highly benefit from additional information, such as the anatomical landmark locations in the projections, to support intra-operative decision making. However, detecting landmarks is challenging since the viewing direction changes substantially between views leading to varying appearance of the same landmark. Therefore, and to the best of our knowledge, view-independent anatomical landmark detection has not been investigated yet.