# EchoGLAD: Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks for Left Ventricle Landmark Detection on Echocardiograms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12229 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12229/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Bayesian Neural Networks: An Introduction and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12024/) (2020)
- [Structured Landmark Detection via Topology-Adapting Deep Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08190/) (2020)
- [High-Throughput Precision Phenotyping of Left Ventricular Hypertrophy with Cardiovascular Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12511/) (2021)
- [Cephalometric Landmark Detection by AttentiveFeature Pyramid Fusion and Regression-Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08841/) (2019)
- [EchoGNN: Explainable Ejection Fraction Estimation with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14003/) (2022)
- [Automated Left Ventricle Dimension Measurement in 2D Cardiac Ultrasound via an Anatomically Meaningful CNN Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02448/) (2019)
- [U-LanD: Uncertainty-Driven Video Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01586/) (2021)
- [Reciprocal Landmark Detection and Tracking with Extremely Few Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11224/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Leveraging Point Transformers for Detecting Anatomical Landmarks in Digital Dentistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11418/) (2025)
- [WiseLVAM: A Novel Framework For Left Ventricle Automatic Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12023/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The functional assessment of the left ventricle chamber of the heart requires detecting four landmark locations and measuring the internal dimension of the left ventricle and the approximate mass of the surrounding muscle. The key challenge of automating this task with machine learning is the sparsity of clinical labels, i.e., only a few landmark pixels in a high-dimensional image are annotated, leading many prior works to heavily rely on isotropic label smoothing. However, such a label smoothing strategy ignores the anatomical information of the image and induces some bias. To address this challenge, we introduce an echocardiogram-based, hierarchical graph neural network (GNN) for left ventricle landmark detection (EchoGLAD). Our main contributions are: 1) a hierarchical graph representation learning framework for multi-resolution landmark detection via GNNs; 2) induced hierarchical supervision at different levels of granularity using a multi-level loss. We evaluate our model on a public and a private dataset under the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. For the ID setting, we achieve the state-of-the-art mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 1.46 mm and 1.86 mm on the two datasets. Our model also shows better OOD generalization than prior works with a testing MAE of 4.3 mm.