Registration of medical image data requires methods that can align anatomical structures precisely while applying smooth and plausible transformations. Ideally, these methods should furthermore operate quickly and apply to a wide variety of tasks. Deep learning-based image registration methods usually entail an elaborate learning procedure with the need for extensive training data. However, they often struggle with versatility when aiming to apply the same approach across various anatomical regions and different imaging modalities. In this work, we present a method that extracts semantic or hand-crafted image features and uses a coupled convex optimisation followed by Adam-based instance optimisation for multitask medical image registration. We make use of pre-trained semantic feature extraction models for the individual datasets and combine them with our fast dual optimisation procedure for deformation field computation. Furthermore, we propose a very fast automatic hyperparameter selection procedure that explores many settings and ranks them on validation data to provide a self-configuring image registration framework. With our approach, we can align image data for various tasks with little learning. We conduct experiments on all available Learn2Reg challenge datasets and obtain results that are to be positioned in the upper ranks of the challenge leaderboards. http://github.com/multimodallearning/convexAdam.

Learning-based registration for large-scale 3D point clouds has been shown to improve robustness and accuracy compared to classical methods and can be trained without supervision for locally rigid problems. However, for tasks with highly deformable structures, such as alignment of pulmonary vascular trees for medical diagnostics, previous approaches of self-supervision with regularisation and point distance losses have failed to succeed, leading to the need for complex synthetic augmentation strategies to obtain reliably strong supervision. In this work, we introduce a novel Differentiable Volumetric Rasterisation of point Clouds (DiVRoC) that overcomes those limitations and offers a highly efficient and accurate loss for large-scale deformable 3D registration. DiVRoC drastically reduces the computational complexity for measuring point cloud distances for high-resolution data with over 100k 3D points and can also be employed to extrapolate and regularise sparse motion fields, as loss in a self-training setting and as objective function in instance optimisation. DiVRoC can be successfully embedded into geometric registration networks, including PointPWC-Net and other graph CNNs. Our approach yields new state-of-the-art accuracy on the challenging PVT dataset in three different settings without training with manual ground truth: 1) unsupervised metric-based learning 2) self-supervised learning with pseudo labels generated by self-training and 3) optimisation based alignment without learning. https://github.com/mattiaspaul/ChasingClouds

A popular benchmark for intra-patient lung registration is provided by the DIR-LAB COPDgene dataset consisting of large-motion in- and expiratory breath-hold CT pairs. This dataset alone, however, does not provide enough samples to properly train state-of-the-art deep learning methods. Other public datasets often also provide only small sample sizes or include primarily small motions between scans that do not translate well to larger deformations. For point-based geometric registration, the PVT1010 dataset provides a large number of vessel point clouds without any correspondences and a labeled test set corresponding to the COPDgene cases. However, the absence of correspondences for supervision complicates training, and a fair comparison with image-based algorithms is infeasible, since CT scans for the training data are not publicly available.We here provide a combined benchmark for image- and point-based registration approaches. We curated a total of 248 public multi-centric in- and expiratory lung CT scans from 124 patients, which show large motion between scans, processed them to ensure sufficient homogeneity between the data and generated vessel point clouds that are well distributed even deeper inside the lungs. For supervised training, we provide vein and artery segmentations of the vessels and multiple thousand image-derived keypoint correspondences for each pair. For validation, we provide multiple scan pairs with manual landmark annotations. Finally, as first baselines on our new benchmark, we evaluate several image and point cloud registration methods on the dataset.

Image registration is a fundamental medical image analysis task, and a wide variety of approaches have been proposed. However, only a few studies have comprehensively compared medical image registration approaches on a wide range of clinically relevant tasks. This limits the development of registration methods, the adoption of research advances into practice, and a fair benchmark across competing approaches. The Learn2Reg challenge addresses these limitations by providing a multi-task medical image registration data set for comprehensive characterisation of deformable registration algorithms. A continuous evaluation will be possible at https://learn2reg.grand-challenge.org. Learn2Reg covers a wide range of anatomies (brain, abdomen, and thorax), modalities (ultrasound, CT, MR), availability of annotations, as well as intra- and inter-patient registration evaluation. We established an easily accessible framework for training and validation of 3D registration methods, which enabled the compilation of results of over 65 individual method submissions from more than 20 unique teams. We used a complementary set of metrics, including robustness, accuracy, plausibility, and runtime, enabling unique insight into the current state-of-the-art of medical image registration. This paper describes datasets, tasks, evaluation methods and results of the challenge, as well as results of further analysis of transferability to new datasets, the importance of label supervision, and resulting bias. While no single approach worked best across all tasks, many methodological aspects could be identified that push the performance of medical image registration to new state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we demystified the common belief that conventional registration methods have to be much slower than deep-learning-based methods.