US Patent 9569736 Intelligent medical image landmark detection

Intelligent image parsing for anatomical landmarks and/or organs detection and/or segmentation is provided. A state space of an artificial agent is specified for discrete portions of a test image. A set of actions is determined, each specifying a possible change in a parametric space with respect to the test image. A reward system is established based on applying each action of the set of actions and based on at least one target state. The artificial agent learns an optimal action-value function approximator specifying the behavior of the artificial agent to maximize a cumulative future reward value of the reward system. The behavior of the artificial agent is a sequence of actions moving the agent towards at least one target state. The learned artificial agent is applied on a test image to automatically parse image content.