TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stebani, Jannik
A1  - Blaimer, Martin
A1  - Zabler, Simon
A1  - Neun, Tilmann
A1  - Pelt, Daniël M.
A1  - Rak, Kristen
T1  - Towards fully automated inner ear analysis with deep-learning-based joint segmentation and landmark detection framework
JF  - Scientific Reports
N2  - Automated analysis of the inner ear anatomy in radiological data instead of time-consuming manual assessment is a worthwhile goal that could facilitate preoperative planning and clinical research. We propose a framework encompassing joint semantic segmentation of the inner ear and anatomical landmark detection of helicotrema, oval and round window. A fully automated pipeline with a single, dual-headed volumetric 3D U-Net was implemented, trained and evaluated using manually labeled in-house datasets from cadaveric specimen (N = 43) and clinical practice (N = 9). The model robustness was further evaluated on three independent open-source datasets (N = 23 + 7 + 17 scans) consisting of cadaveric specimen scans. For the in-house datasets, Dice scores of 0.97 and 0.94, intersection-over-union scores of 0.94 and 0.89 and average Hausdorf distances of 0.065 and 0.14 voxel units were achieved. The landmark localization task was performed automatically with an average localization error of 3.3 and 5.2 voxel units. A robust, albeit reduced performance could be 
attained for the catalogue of three open-source datasets. Results of the ablation studies with 43 mono-parametric variations of the basal architecture and training protocol provided task-optimal parameters for both categories. Ablation studies against single-task variants of the basal architecture showed a clear performance beneft of coupling landmark localization with segmentation and a dataset-dependent performance impact on segmentation ability.
KW  - anatomy
KW  - bone imaging
KW  - diagnosis
KW  - medical imaging
KW  - software
KW  - three-dimensional imaging
KW  - tomography
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-357411
VL  - 13
ER  -