One Registration is Worth Two Segmentations

Shiqi Huang*, Tingfa Xu, Ziyi Shen, Shaheer Ullah Saeed, Wen Yan, Dean Barratt, Yipeng Hu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

The goal of image registration is to establish spatial correspondence between two or more images, traditionally through dense displacement fields (DDFs) or parametric transformations (e.g., rigid, affine, and splines). Rethinking the existing paradigms of achieving alignment via spatial transformations, we uncover an alternative but more intuitive correspondence representation: a set of corresponding regions-of-interest (ROI) pairs, which we demonstrate to have sufficient representational capability as other correspondence representation methods. Further, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for these ROIs to hold specific anatomical or semantic significance. In turn, we formulate image registration as searching for the same set of corresponding ROIs from both moving and fixed images - in other words, two multi-class segmentation tasks on a pair of images. For a general-purpose and practical implementation, we integrate the segment anything model (SAM) into our proposed algorithms, resulting in a SAM-enabled registration (SAMReg) that does not require any training data, gradient-based fine-tuning or engineered prompts. We experimentally show that the proposed SAMReg is capable of segmenting and matching multiple ROI pairs, which establish sufficiently accurate correspondences, in three clinical applications of registering prostate MR, cardiac MR and abdominal CT images. Based on metrics including Dice and target registration errors on anatomical structures, the proposed registration outperforms both intensity-based iterative algorithms and DDF-predicting learning-based networks, even yielding competitive performance with weakly-supervised registration which requires fully-segmented training data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2024 - 27th International Conference, Proceedings
EditorsMarius George Linguraru, Qi Dou, Aasa Feragen, Stamatia Giannarou, Ben Glocker, Karim Lekadir, Julia A. Schnabel
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages665-675
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9783031723896
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024 - Marrakesh, Morocco
Duration: 6 Oct 202410 Oct 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15012 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024
Country/TerritoryMorocco
CityMarrakesh
Period6/10/2410/10/24

Keywords

  • Correspondence Representation
  • Image Registration
  • Segment Anything Model (SAM)

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