Unsupervised Learning for Fast Probabilistic Diffeomorphic Registration

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. Traditional deformable registration techniques achieve impressive results and offer a rigorous theoretical treatment, but are computationally intensive since they solve an optimization problem for each image pair. Recently, learning-based methods have facilitat...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dalca, Adrian V., Balakrishnan, Guha, Guttag, John, Sabuncu, Mert R.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer International Publishing 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137585
Description
Summary:© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. Traditional deformable registration techniques achieve impressive results and offer a rigorous theoretical treatment, but are computationally intensive since they solve an optimization problem for each image pair. Recently, learning-based methods have facilitated fast registration by learning spatial deformation functions. However, these approaches use restricted deformation models, require supervised labels, or do not guarantee a diffeomorphic (topology-preserving) registration. Furthermore, learning-based registration tools have not been derived from a probabilistic framework that can offer uncertainty estimates. In this paper, we present a probabilistic generative model and derive an unsupervised learning-based inference algorithm that makes use of recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We demonstrate our method on a 3D brain registration task, and provide an empirical analysis of the algorithm. Our approach results in state of the art accuracy and very fast runtimes, while providing diffeomorphic guarantees and uncertainty estimates. Our implementation is available online at http://voxelmorph.csail.mit.edu.