A Coarse-to-Fine Deformable Transformation Framework for Unsupervised Multi-Contrast MR Image Registration with Dual Consistency Constraint

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2021 Oct;40(10):2589-2599. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2021.3059282. Epub 2021 Sep 30.

Abstract

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) image registration is useful in the clinic to achieve fast and accurate imaging-based disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Nevertheless, the efficiency and performance of the existing registration algorithms can still be improved. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised learning-based framework to achieve accurate and efficient multi-contrast MR image registration. Specifically, an end-to-end coarse-to-fine network architecture consisting of affine and deformable transformations is designed to improve the robustness and achieve end-to-end registration. Furthermore, a dual consistency constraint and a new prior knowledge-based loss function are developed to enhance the registration performances. The proposed method has been evaluated on a clinical dataset containing 555 cases, and encouraging performances have been achieved. Compared to the commonly utilized registration methods, including VoxelMorph, SyN, and LT-Net, the proposed method achieves better registration performance with a Dice score of 0.8397± 0.0756 in identifying stroke lesions. With regards to the registration speed, our method is about 10 times faster than the most competitive method of SyN (Affine) when testing on a CPU. Moreover, we prove that our method can still perform well on more challenging tasks with lacking scanning information data, showing the high robustness for the clinical application.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging*