{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/multiple-landmark-detection-using-multi-agent","title":"Multiple Landmark Detection using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"1907.00318","date":"2019-06-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Athanasios Vlontzos","Amir Alansary","Konstantinos Kamnitsas","Daniel Rueckert","Bernhard Kainz"],"abstract":"The detection of anatomical landmarks is a vital step for medical image analysis and applications for diagnosis, interpretation and guidance. Manual annotation of landmarks is a tedious process that requires domain-specific expertise and introduces inter-observer variability. This paper proposes a new detection approach for multiple landmarks based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our hypothesis is that the position of all anatomical landmarks is interdependent and non-random within the human anatomy, thus finding one landmark can help to deduce the location of others. Using a Deep Q-Network (DQN) architecture we construct an environment and agent with implicit inter-communication such that we can accommodate K agents acting and learning simultaneously, while they attempt to detect K different landmarks. During training the agents collaborate by sharing their accumulated knowledge for a collective gain. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art architectures and achieve significantly better accuracy by reducing the detection error by 50%, while requiring fewer computational resources and time to train compared to the naive approach of training K agents separately.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00318v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00318v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"multiple-landmark-detection-using-multi-agent","repo_url":"https://github.com/thanosvlo/MARL-for-Anatomical-Landmark-Detection","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anatomy","task_name":"Anatomy"},{"task_slug":"medical-image-analysis","task_name":"Medical Image Analysis"},{"task_slug":"multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}