Searching Collaborative Agents for Multi-plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound
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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 degree/2.21mm, 8.62 degree/2.36mm and 5.93 degree/0.89mm 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.
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