D I just found out that my 1 years' worth of research has alre | Data Scientology

D I just found out that my 1 years' worth of research has already been published.

I'm a PhD student in the middle of my studies. A year ago I had an idea about designing a neural network for medical image segmentation using shape priors. I have done a quick literature review at that time (although I admit, it might not have been thorough enough) and I found that no one really tried to use those shape priors before, especially for the task that i wanted to use them on (these descriptors would fit the specific task especially well). I worked hard on the implementation, designing the network architecture, writing the article and understanding all the necessary mathematical proofs/theorems related to this task. I just submitted the article a few weeks ago (no word from it yet), and today, I found an article on arxiv (no citations) that has been published this spring and basically uses the same idea for the same task as I did. The network architecture is different than mine and the performance evaluation is different, but the main selling point of my article, the usage of these shape priors has already been published. I am a bit devastated at this point because this would have been my first 1st author paper and I really put a lot of effort and thought into this, only to discover that my idea has already been discovered before. Obviously I need to do a much more thorough literature review next time so that this doesn't happen again, but besides that, I don't know what else I could do to mitigate the damage that has been done to my motivation. I am even considering quitting PhD at this moment because I feel like I wasted a lot of time because of my stupidity. Has anything similar happened to you before? Do you have any advice? How could you cope with similar issues in your career?

/r/MachineLearning
https://redd.it/rgykys