# Measurement of Medial Elbow Joint Space using Landmark Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13010/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06278/) (2019)
- [Human Pose Regression with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11291/) (2021)
- [Joint Training of a Convolutional Network and a Graphical Model for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2984/) (2014)
- [TransPose: Keypoint Localization via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14214/) (2020)
- [Compositional Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00159/) (2017)
- [Human Pose Estimation with Iterative Error Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.06550/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation Via Disentangled Keypoint Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02300/) (2021)
- [TokenPose: Learning Keypoint Tokens for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03516/) (2021)
- [The Devil is in the Details: Delving into Unbiased Data Processing for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07524/) (2019)
- [Learning Feature Pyramids for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01101/) (2017)
- [Human pose estimation via Convolutional Part Heatmap Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01743/) (2016)
- [Human Pose as Compositional Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11638/) (2023)
- [Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Enhanced Channel-wise and Spatial Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03466/) (2019)
- [Graph-PCNN: Two Stage Human Pose Estimation with Graph Pose Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10599/) (2020)
- [Automated Left Ventricle Dimension Measurement in 2D Cardiac Ultrasound via an Anatomically Meaningful CNN Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02448/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Detection of Medial Epicondyle Avulsion in Elbow Ultrasound Images via Bone Structure Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20104/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ultrasound imaging of the medial elbow is crucial for the early diagnosis of Ulnar Collateral Ligament (UCL) injuries. Specifically, measuring the elbow joint space in ultrasound images is used to assess the valgus instability of the elbow caused by UCL injuries. To automate this measurement, a model trained on a precisely annotated dataset is necessary; however, no publicly available dataset exists to date. This study introduces a novel ultrasound medial elbow dataset to measure the joint space. The dataset comprises 4,201 medial elbow ultrasound images from 22 subjects, with landmark annotations on the humerus and ulna, based on the expertise of three orthopedic surgeons. We evaluated joint space measurement methods on our proposed dataset using heatmap-based, regression-based, and token-based landmark detection methods. While heatmap-based landmark detection methods generally achieve high accuracy, they sometimes produce multiple peaks on a heatmap, leading to incorrect detection. To mitigate this issue and enhance landmark localization, we propose Shape Subspace (SS) landmark refinement by measuring geometrical similarities between the detected and reference landmark positions. The results show that the mean joint space measurement error is 0.116 mm when using HRNet. Furthermore, SS landmark refinement can reduce the mean absolute error of landmark positions by 0.010 mm with HRNet and by 0.103 mm with ViTPose on average. These highlight the potential for high-precision, real-time diagnosis of UCL injuries by accurately measuring joint space. Lastly, we demonstrate point-based segmentation for the humerus and ulna using the detected landmarks as inputs. Our dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/Akahori000/Ultrasound-Medial-Elbow-Dataset
