Multi-environment lifelong deep reinforcement learning for medical imaging

Deep reinforcement learning(DRL) is increasingly being explored in medical imaging. However, the environments for medical imaging tasks are constantly evolving in terms of imaging orientations, imaging sequences, and pathologies. To that end, we developed a Lifelong DRL framework, SERIL to continually learn new tasks in changing imaging environments without catastrophic forgetting. SERIL was developed using selective experience replay based lifelong learning technique for the localization of five anatomical landmarks in brain MRI on a sequence of twenty-four different imaging environments. The performance of SERIL, when compared to two baseline setups: MERT(multi-environment-best-case) and SERT(single-environment-worst-case) demonstrated excellent performance with an average distance of 9.90±7.35 pixels from the desired landmark across all 120 tasks, compared to 10.29±9.07 for MERT and 36.37±22.41 for SERT(p<0.05), demonstrating the excellent potential for continuously learning multiple tasks across dynamically changing imaging environments.