Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.

Despite current advancement in the field of biomedical image processing, propelled by the deep learning revolution, multimodal image registration, due to its several challenges, is still often performed manually by specialists. The recent success of image-to-image (I2I) translation in computer visio...

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Main Authors: Jiahao Lu, Johan Öfverstedt, Joakim Lindblad, Nataša Sladoje
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2022-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276196
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author Jiahao Lu
Johan Öfverstedt
Joakim Lindblad
Nataša Sladoje
author_facet Jiahao Lu
Johan Öfverstedt
Joakim Lindblad
Nataša Sladoje
author_sort Jiahao Lu
collection DOAJ
description Despite current advancement in the field of biomedical image processing, propelled by the deep learning revolution, multimodal image registration, due to its several challenges, is still often performed manually by specialists. The recent success of image-to-image (I2I) translation in computer vision applications and its growing use in biomedical areas provide a tempting possibility of transforming the multimodal registration problem into a, potentially easier, monomodal one. We conduct an empirical study of the applicability of modern I2I translation methods for the task of rigid registration of multimodal biomedical and medical 2D and 3D images. We compare the performance of four Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based I2I translation methods and one contrastive representation learning method, subsequently combined with two representative monomodal registration methods, to judge the effectiveness of modality translation for multimodal image registration. We evaluate these method combinations on four publicly available multimodal (2D and 3D) datasets and compare with the performance of registration achieved by several well-known approaches acting directly on multimodal image data. Our results suggest that, although I2I translation may be helpful when the modalities to register are clearly correlated, registration of modalities which express distinctly different properties of the sample are not well handled by the I2I translation approach. The evaluated representation learning method, which aims to find abstract image-like representations of the information shared between the modalities, manages better, and so does the Mutual Information maximisation approach, acting directly on the original multimodal images. We share our complete experimental setup as open-source (https://github.com/MIDA-group/MultiRegEval), including method implementations, evaluation code, and all datasets, for further reproducing and benchmarking.
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spelling doaj.art-75cc9961a11c4264ad966e5e2b21983d2022-12-24T05:32:49ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032022-01-011711e027619610.1371/journal.pone.0276196Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.Jiahao LuJohan ÖfverstedtJoakim LindbladNataša SladojeDespite current advancement in the field of biomedical image processing, propelled by the deep learning revolution, multimodal image registration, due to its several challenges, is still often performed manually by specialists. The recent success of image-to-image (I2I) translation in computer vision applications and its growing use in biomedical areas provide a tempting possibility of transforming the multimodal registration problem into a, potentially easier, monomodal one. We conduct an empirical study of the applicability of modern I2I translation methods for the task of rigid registration of multimodal biomedical and medical 2D and 3D images. We compare the performance of four Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based I2I translation methods and one contrastive representation learning method, subsequently combined with two representative monomodal registration methods, to judge the effectiveness of modality translation for multimodal image registration. We evaluate these method combinations on four publicly available multimodal (2D and 3D) datasets and compare with the performance of registration achieved by several well-known approaches acting directly on multimodal image data. Our results suggest that, although I2I translation may be helpful when the modalities to register are clearly correlated, registration of modalities which express distinctly different properties of the sample are not well handled by the I2I translation approach. The evaluated representation learning method, which aims to find abstract image-like representations of the information shared between the modalities, manages better, and so does the Mutual Information maximisation approach, acting directly on the original multimodal images. We share our complete experimental setup as open-source (https://github.com/MIDA-group/MultiRegEval), including method implementations, evaluation code, and all datasets, for further reproducing and benchmarking.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276196
spellingShingle Jiahao Lu
Johan Öfverstedt
Joakim Lindblad
Nataša Sladoje
Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.
PLoS ONE
title Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.
title_full Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.
title_fullStr Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.
title_full_unstemmed Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.
title_short Is image-to-image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration? A comparative study.
title_sort is image to image translation the panacea for multimodal image registration a comparative study
url https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276196
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