This paper presents a novel predictive model, MetaMorph, for metamorphic registration of images with appearance changes (i.e., caused by brain tumors). In contrast to previous learning-based registration methods that have little or no control over appearance-changes, our model introduces a new regularization that can effectively suppress the negative effects of appearance changing areas. In particular, we develop a piecewise regularization on the tangent space of diffeomorphic transformations (also known as initial velocity fields) via learned segmentation maps of abnormal regions. The geometric transformation and appearance changes are treated as joint tasks that are mutually beneficial. Our model MetaMorph is more robust and accurate when searching for an optimal registration solution under the guidance of segmentation, which in turn improves the segmentation performance by providing appropriately augmented training labels. We validate MetaMorph on real 3D human brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art learning-based registration models. The proposed MetaMorph has great potential in various image-guided clinical interventions, e.g., real-time image-guided navigation systems for tumor removal surgery.
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Diffeomorphic Image Registration using Lipschitz Continuous Residual Networks
Image registration is an essential task in medical image analysis. We propose two novel unsupervised diffeomorphic image registration networks, which use deep Residual Networks (ResNets) as numerical approximations of the underlying continuous diffeomorphic setting governed by ordinary differential equations (ODEs), viewed as a Eulerian discretization scheme. While considering the ODE-based parameterizations of diffeomorphisms, we consider both stationary and non-stationary (time varying) velocity fields as the driving velocities to solve the ODEs, which give rise to our two proposed architectures for diffeomorphic registration. We also employ Lipschitz-continuity on the Residual Networks in both architectures to define the admissible Hilbert space of velocity fields as a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS) and regularize the smoothness of the velocity fields. We apply both registration networks to align and segment the OASIS brain MRI dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our models are computational efficient and achieve comparable registration results with a smoother deformation field.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1755970
- PAR ID:
- 10350887
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
- ISSN:
- 2640-3498
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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