Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration Using Polyphase UNet for 3D Brain MRI Volumes

Purpose: Image registration is a fundamental task in various medical imaging studies and clinical image analyses, such as comparison of patient data with anatomical structures. In order to solve the problems of conventional image registration approaches, such as long computational time, recent deep-learning supervised and unsupervised methods have been extensively studied because of their excellent performance and fast computational time. In this study, we propose a deep-learning-based network for deformable medical image registration using unsupervised learning. Materials and Methods: In this paper, we solve the image-registration optimization problem by modelling a function using a convolutional neural network with polyphase decomposition to learn the spatial transformable parameters based on the input images and to generate the registration field. A spatial transformer is used to reconstruct the output warped image while imposing smoothness constraints on the registration field. With polyphase decomposition, our proposed method learns more features based on the input image pairs without the need for any ground-truth registration field. Results: Experimental results using 3D T1 brain MRI volume scans and compared with state-of-the-art image-registration methods demonstrated that our method provides better 3D-image registration. Conclusion: Our proposed method uses less computational time in registering unseen pairs of input images during inference and can be applied for other unimodal image registration tasks, and the hyper-parameters can be adjusted for the specific task.