Unsupervised 3D End-to-end Deformable Network for Brain MRI Registration

Volumetric medical image registration has important clinical significance. Traditional registration methods may be time-consuming when processing large volumetric data due to their iterative optimizations. In contrast, existing deep learning-based networks can obtain the registration quickly. However, most of them require independent rigid alignment before deformable registration; these two steps are often performed separately and cannot be end-to-end. Moreover, registration ground-truth is difficult to obtain for supervised learning methods. To tackle the above issues, we propose an unsupervised 3D end-to-end deformable registration network. The proposed network cascades two subnetworks; the first one is for obtaining affine alignment, and the second one is a deformable subnetwork for achieving the non-rigid registration. The parameters of the two subnetworks are shared. The global and local similarity measures are used as loss functions for the two subnetworks, respectively. The trained network can perform end-to-end deformable registration. We conducted experiments on brain MRI datasets (LPBA40, Mindboggle101, and IXI) and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed registration network.