Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in computer vision that aims to estimate the transformation between corresponding sets of points. Non-rigid registration, in particular, involves addressing challenges including various levels of deformation, noise, outliers, and data incompleteness. This paper introduces Robust-DefReg, a robust non-rigid point cloud registration method based on graph convolutional networks (GCNNs). Robust-DefReg is a coarse-to-fine registration approach within an end-to-end pipeline, leveraging the advantages of both coarse and fine methods. The method learns global features to find correspondences between source and target point clouds, to enable appropriate initial alignment, and subsequently fine registration. The simultaneous achievement of high accuracy and robustness across all challenges is reported less frequently in existing studies, making it a key objective of the Robust-DefReg method. The proposed method achieves high accuracy in large deformations while maintaining computational efficiency. This method possesses three primary attributes: high accuracy, robustness to different challenges, and computational efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed Robust-DefReg holds significant potential as a foundational architecture for future investigations in non-rigid point cloud registration. The source code of Robust-DefReg is available.
Towards Patient-Specific Deformable Registration in Laparoscopic Surgery
Biomedical Robotics Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy(生物医学机器人实验室,意大利理工学院,热那亚);Department of Computer Science, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering (DIBRIS), University of Genoa, Italy(计算机科学、生物工程、机器人与系统工程系(DIBRIS),热那亚大学,意大利);Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, USA(哈佛医学院,布里洛妇女医院,美国波士顿)
Universidad de Alcalá(阿尔卡拉大学);Universidad Rey Juan Carlos(胡安卡洛斯国王大学);Institut de Recherche contre les Cancers de l’Appareil Digestif(消化道癌症研究所);Université Clermont-Auvergne(克莱蒙奥弗涅大学)
We present Deep Shape-from-Template (DeepSfT), a novel Deep Neural Network (DNN) method for solving real-time automatic registration and 3D reconstruction of a deformable object viewed in a single monocular image.DeepSfT advances the state-of-the-art in various aspects. Compared to existing DNN SfT methods, it is the first fully convolutional real-time approach that handles an arbitrary object geometry, topology and surface representation. It also does not require ground truth registration with real data and scales well to very complex object models with large numbers of elements. Compared to …
University of Bern(伯尔尼大学);CentraleSupélec(中央理工-高等电力学院);Université Paris-Saclay(巴黎-萨克雷大学);Groupe Hospitalier Cochin-Hôtel Dieu(科钦-主宫医院集团);Université Paris Descartes(巴黎笛卡尔大学);TheraPanacea
Image registration and in particular deformable registration methods are pillars of medical imaging. Inspired by the recent advances in deep learning, we propose in this paper, a novel convolutional neural network architecture that couples linear and deformable registration within a unified architecture endowed with near real-time performance. Our framework is modular with respect to the global transformation component, as well as with respect to the similarity function while it guarantees smooth displacement fields. We evaluate the performance of our network on the challenging problem of MRI …
Jadavpur University(贾达布尔大学);University of Alberta(阿尔伯塔大学)
Deformable registration is ubiquitous in medical image analysis. Many deformable registration methods minimize sum of squared difference (SSD) as the registration cost with respect to deformable model parameters. In this work, we construct a tight upper bound of the SSD registration cost by using a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) in the registration pipeline. The upper bound SSD (UB-SSD) enhances the original deformable model parameter space by adding a heatmap output from FCNN. Next, we minimize this UB-SSD by adjusting both the parameters of the FCNN and the parameters of the defor…
New York University(纽约大学);Hyperfine Research(Hyperfine研究公司);Yale University(耶鲁大学)
Establishing voxelwise semantic correspondence across distinct imaging modalities is a foundational yet formidable computer vision task. Current multi-modality registration techniques maximize hand-crafted inter-domain similarity functions, are limited in modeling nonlinear intensity-relationships and deformations, and may require significant re-engineering or underperform on new tasks, datasets, and domain pairs. This work presents ContraReg, an unsupervised contrastive representation learning approach to multi-modality deformable registration. By projecting learned multi-scale local patch fe…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)(韩国科学技术院)
Deformable image registration is one of the fundamental tasks in medical imaging. Classical registration algorithms usually require a high computational cost for iterative optimizations. Although deep-learning-based methods have been developed for fast image registration, it is still challenging to obtain realistic continuous deformations from a moving image to a fixed image with less topological folding problem. To address this, here we present a novel diffusion-model-based image registration method, called DiffuseMorph. DiffuseMorph not only generates synthetic deformed images through revers…
Deformable templates are essential to large-scale medical image registration, segmentation, and population analysis. Current conventional and deep network-based methods for template construction use only regularized registration objectives and often yield templates with blurry and/or anatomically implausible appearance, confounding downstream biomedical interpretation. We reformulate deformable registration and conditional template estimation as an adversarial game wherein we encourage realism in the moved templates with a generative adversarial registration framework conditioned on flexible i…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学);College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学生命科学与技术学院)
Deformable medical image registration plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Recently, the deep learning (DL) based image registration methods have been widely investigated and showed excellent performance in computational speed. However, these methods cannot provide enough registration accuracy because of insufficient ability in representing both the global and local features of the moving and fixed images. To address this issue, this paper has proposed the transformer based image registration method. This method uses the distinctive transformer to extract the global and…
Fraunhofer MEVIS(弗劳恩霍夫医学图像计算研究所);Radboud UMC(拉德堡德大学医学中心);University of Lübeck(吕贝克大学)
While deep learning has achieved significant advances in accuracy for medical image segmentation, its benefits for deformable image registration have so far remained limited to reduced computation times. Previous work has either focused on replacing the iterative optimization of distance and smoothness terms with CNN-layers or using supervised approaches driven by labels. Our method is the first to combine the complementary strengths of global semantic information (represented by segmentation labels) and local distance metrics that help align surrounding structures. We demonstrate significant …
Westfälische Hochschule University of Applied Sciences(威斯特伐利亚应用科学大学)
Central venous catheters (CVC) are commonly inserted into the large veins of the neck, e.g. the internal jugular vein (IJV). CVC insertion may cause serious complications like misplacement into an artery or perforation of cervical vessels. Placing a CVC under sonographic guidance is an appropriate method to reduce such adverse events, if anatomical landmarks like venous and arterial vessels can be detected reliably. This task shall be solved by registration of patient individual images vs. an anatomically labelled reference image. In this work, a linear, affine transformation is performed on c…
Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht and Utrecht University(乌得勒支大学医学中心与乌得勒支大学影像科学研究所);Division of Image Processing of the Leiden University Medical Center(莱顿大学医学中心图像处理部)
Image registration, the process of aligning two or more images, is the core technique of many (semi-)automatic medical image analysis tasks. Recent studies have shown that deep learning methods, notably convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), can be used for image registration. Thus far training of ConvNets for registration was supervised using predefined example registrations. However, obtaining example registrations is not trivial. To circumvent the need for predefined examples, and thereby to increase convenience of training ConvNets for image registration, we propose the Deep Learning Im…
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University(京都大学信息学研究科);Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University(京都大学医学研究科)
Organ shape reconstruction based on a single-projection image during treatment has wide clinical scope, e.g., in image-guided radiotherapy and surgical guidance. We propose an image-to-graph convolutional network that achieves deformable registration of a 3D organ mesh for a single-viewpoint 2D projection image. This framework enables simultaneous training of two types of transformation: from the 2D projection image to a displacement map, and from the sampled per-vertex feature to a 3D displacement that satisfies the geometrical constraint of the mesh structure. Assuming application to radiati…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(韩国科学技术院);University of Ulsan College of Medicine(蔚山大学医学院);Asan Medical Center(峨山医学中心)
Medical image registration is one of the key processing steps for biomedical image analysis such as cancer diagnosis. Recently, deep learning based supervised and unsupervised image registration methods have been extensively studied due to its excellent performance in spite of ultra-fast computational time compared to the classical approaches. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised medical image registration method that trains deep neural network for deformable registration of 3D volumes using a cycle-consistency. Thanks to the cycle consistency, the proposed deep neural networks can t…
Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht(乌得勒支大学医学中心图像科学研究所);Division of Image Processing, Leiden University Medical Center(莱顿大学医学中心图像处理部)
In this work we propose a deep learning network for deformable image registration (DIRNet). The DIRNet consists of a convolutional neural network (ConvNet) regressor, a spatial transformer, and a resampler. The ConvNet analyzes a pair of fixed and moving images and outputs parameters for the spatial transformer, which generates the displacement vector field that enables the resampler to warp the moving image to the fixed image. The DIRNet is trained end-to-end by unsupervised optimization of a similarity metric between input image pairs. A trained DIRNet can be applied to perform registration …
University College London(伦敦大学学院);Massachusetts General Hospital(马萨诸塞总医院);Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院)
Landmark correspondences are a widely used type of gold standard in image registration. However, the manual placement of corresponding points is subject to high inter-user variability in the chosen annotated locations and in the interpretation of visual ambiguities. In this paper, we introduce a principled strategy for the construction of a gold standard in deformable registration. Our framework: (i) iteratively suggests the most informative location to annotate next, taking into account its redundancy with previous annotations; (ii) extends traditional pointwise annotations by accounting for …
Deformable image registration, i.e., the task of aligning multiple images into one coordinate system by non-linear transformation, serves as an essential preprocessing step for neuroimaging data. Recent research on deformable image registration is mainly focused on improving the registration accuracy using multi-stage alignment methods, where the source image is repeatedly deformed in stages by a same neural network until it is well-aligned with the target image. Conventional methods for multi-stage registration can often blur the source image as the pixel/voxel values are repeatedly interpola…
University of Utah(犹他大学);University of Maryland, School of Medicine(马里兰大学医学院)
Radiation therapy presents a need for dynamic tracking of a target tumor volume. Fiducial markers such as implanted gold seeds have been used to gate radiation delivery but the markers are invasive and gating significantly increases treatment time. Pretreatment acquisition of a respiratory correlated 4DCT allows for determination of accurate motion tracking which is useful in treatment planning. We design a patient-specific motion subspace and a deep convolutional neural network to recover anatomical positions from a single fluoroscopic projection in real-time. We use this deep network to appr…
University College London(伦敦大学学院);University of Oxford(牛津大学)
Spatially aligning medical images from different modalities remains a challenging task, especially for intraoperative applications that require fast and robust algorithms. We propose a weakly-supervised, label-driven formulation for learning 3D voxel correspondence from higher-level label correspondence, thereby bypassing classical intensity-based image similarity measures. During training, a convolutional neural network is optimised by outputting a dense displacement field (DDF) that warps a set of available anatomical labels from the moving image to match their corresponding counterparts in …
Deformable registration is one of the most challenging task in the field of medical image analysis, especially for the alignment between different sequences and modalities. In this paper, a non-rigid registration method is proposed for 3D medical images leveraging unsupervised learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to introduce gradient loss into deep-learning-based registration. The proposed gradient loss is robust across sequences and modals for large deformation. Besides, adversarial learning approach is used to transfer multi-modal similarity to mono-modal simila…
Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), IIIT-Hyderabad(国际信息技术研究所(海得拉巴)视觉信息技术中心(CVIT))
Feature-based registration has been popular with a variety of features ranging from voxel intensity to Self-Similarity Context (SSC). In this paper, we examine the question on how features learnt using various Deep Learning (DL) frameworks can be used for deformable registration and whether this feature learning is necessary or not. We investigate the use of features learned by different DL methods in the current state-of-the-art discrete registration framework and analyze its performance on 2 publicly available datasets. We draw insights into the type of DL framework useful for feature learni…
Objective: Deformable image registration is a fundamental problem in medical image analysis, with applications such as longitudinal studies, population modeling, and atlas based image segmentation. Registration is often phrased as an optimization problem, i.e., finding a deformation field that is optimal according to a given objective function. Discrete, combinatorial, optimization techniques have successfully been employed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Specifically, optimization based on $α$-expansion with minimal graph cuts has been proposed as a powerful tool for image regist…
We present a fast learning-based algorithm for deformable, pairwise 3D medical image registration. Current registration methods optimize an objective function independently for each pair of images, which can be time-consuming for large data. We define registration as a parametric function, and optimize its parameters given a set of images from a collection of interest. Given a new pair of scans, we can quickly compute a registration field by directly evaluating the function using the learned parameters. We model this function using a convolutional neural network (CNN), and use a spatial transf…
University of North Carolina(北卡罗来纳大学);Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学)
Deformable image registration is fundamental to longitudinal and population analysis. Geometric alignment of the infant brain MR images is challenging, owing to rapid changes in image appearance in association with brain development. In this paper, we propose an infant-dedicated deep registration network that uses the auto-context strategy to gradually refine the deformation fields to obtain highly accurate correspondences. Instead of training multiple registration networks, our method estimates the deformation fields by invoking a single network multiple times for iterative deformation refine…
Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University(清华大学深圳研究生院);The University of Texas at Arlington(德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校)
Accurate registration of medical images is vital for doctor's diagnosis and quantitative analysis. In this paper, we propose a new deformable medical image registration method based on average geometric transformations and VoxelMorph CNN architecture. We compute the differential geometric information including Jacobian determinant(JD) and the curl vector(CV) of diffeomorphic registration field and use them as multi-channel of VoxelMorph CNN for second train. In addition, we use the average transformation to construct a standard brain MRI atlas which can be used as fixed image. We verify our me…
Imperial College London(帝国理工学院);TheraPanacea;University of Oxford(牛津大学);CentraleSupelec(中央高等电力学院);INRIA(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);Universite Paris-Saclay(巴黎萨克雷大学)
We propose a novel weakly supervised discriminative algorithm for learning context specific registration metrics as a linear combination of conventional similarity measures. Conventional metrics have been extensively used over the past two decades and therefore both their strengths and limitations are known. The challenge is to find the optimal relative weighting (or parameters) of different metrics forming the similarity measure of the registration algorithm. Hand-tuning these parameters would result in sub optimal solutions and quickly become infeasible as the number of metrics increases. Fu…
We propose a registration algorithm for 2D CT/MRI medical images with a new unsupervised end-to-end strategy using convolutional neural networks. The contributions of our algorithm are threefold: (1) We transplant traditional image registration algorithms to an end-to-end convolutional neural network framework, while maintaining the unsupervised nature of image registration problems. The image-to-image integrated framework can simultaneously learn both image features and transformation matrix for registration. (2) Training with additional data without any label can further improve the registra…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(韩国科学技术院);The Catholic University of Korea(韩国加图立大学);University of Ulsan College of Medicine(蔚山大学医学院);Asan Medical Center(峨山医疗中心);Korea Automotive Technology Institute(韩国汽车技术研究院)
Image registration is a fundamental task in medical image analysis. Recently, deep learning based image registration methods have been extensively investigated due to their excellent performance despite the ultra-fast computational time. However, the existing deep learning methods still have limitation in the preservation of original topology during the deformation with registration vector fields. To address this issues, here we present a cycle-consistent deformable image registration. The cycle consistency enhances image registration performance by providing an implicit regularization to pres…
University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre(英国癌症研究中心剑桥中心);Medical University Vienna(维也纳医科大学);Cambridge University Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust(剑桥大学医院国民保健服务基金会信托);Eindhoven University of Technology(埃因霍温理工大学);Leiden University(莱顿大学);University College London(伦敦大学学院);Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute(英国癌症研究中心剑桥研究所)
This study investigates the use of the unsupervised deep learning framework VoxelMorph for deformable registration of longitudinal abdominopelvic CT images acquired in patients with bone metastases from breast cancer. The CT images were refined prior to registration by automatically removing the CT table and all other extra-corporeal components. To improve the learning capabilities of VoxelMorph when only a limited amount of training data is available, a novel incremental training strategy is proposed based on simulated deformations of consecutive CT images. In a 4-fold cross-validation scheme…
Domain-Shift Immunity in Deep Deformable Registration via Local Feature Representations
Kahlert School of Computing(卡尔伯特计算学校);Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute(科学计算与成像研究所);University of Utah(犹他大学);Department of Biomedical Engineering(生物医学工程系)
Radboud University Medical Center(拉德堡德大学医学中心);University of Leeds(利兹大学);Sichuan University(四川大学);University of North Carolina(北卡罗来纳大学)
Unsupervised learning strategy is widely adopted by the deformable registration models due to the lack of ground truth of deformation fields. These models typically depend on the intensity-based similarity loss to obtain the learning convergence. Despite the success, such dependence is insufficient. For the deformable registration of mono-modality image, well-aligned two images not only have indistinguishable intensity differences, but also are close in the statistical distribution and the boundary areas. Considering that well-designed loss functions can facilitate a learning model into a desi…
Fraunhofer Institute for Medical Image Computing (MEVIS)(弗劳恩霍夫医学图像计算研究所(MEVIS));Universität zu Lübeck(吕贝克大学)
We present a highly parallel method for accurate and efficient variational deformable 3D image registration on a consumer-grade graphics processing unit (GPU). We build on recent matrix-free variational approaches and specialize the concepts to the massively-parallel manycore architecture provided by the GPU. Compared to a parallel and optimized CPU implementation, this allows us to achieve an average speedup of 32.53 on 986 real-world CT thorax-abdomen follow-up scans. At a resolution of approximately $256^3$ voxels, the average runtime is 1.99 seconds for the full registration. On the public…
MSR:Hybrid Field Modeling for CT-MRI Rigid-Deformable Registration of the Cervical Spine with an Annotated Dataset
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, 510515, China.(南方医科大学生物医学工程学院);Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing, Guangzhou, 510515, China.(广东省医学图像处理重点实验室);Guangdong Province Engineering Laboratory for Medical Imaging(广东省医学影像与诊断技术工程实验室);Information Center, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, 510515, China.(南方医科大学南华医院信息中心);Division of Spine Surgery, Department of Orthopaedics, Nanfang hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510515, China.(南方医科大学南华医院骨科脊柱外科)
Tsinghua University(清华大学);Brigham and Women’s Hospital(布莱根妇女医院);Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院)
Deformable image registration (DIR) is essential for many image-guided therapies. Recently, deep learning approaches have gained substantial popularity and success in DIR. Most deep learning approaches use the so-called mono-stream "high-to-low, low-to-high" network structure, and can achieve satisfactory overall registration results. However, accurate alignments for some severely deformed local regions, which are crucial for pinpointing surgical targets, are often overlooked. Consequently, these approaches are not sensitive to some hard-to-align regions, e.g., intra-patient registration of de…
Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz Universität Hannover(汉诺威莱布尼茨大学机电系统研究所)
We present deformable unsupervised medical image registration using a randomly-initialized deep convolutional neural network (CNN) as regularization prior. Conventional registration methods predict a transformation by minimizing dissimilarities between an image pair. The minimization is usually regularized with manually engineered priors, which limits the potential of the registration. By learning transformation priors from a large dataset, CNNs have achieved great success in deformable registration. However, learned methods are restricted to domain-specific data and the required amounts of me…
Robarts Research Institute(罗巴茨研究所);Western University(韦仕敦大学)
Optimization techniques have been widely used in deformable registration, allowing for the incorporation of similarity metrics with regularization mechanisms. These regularization mechanisms are designed to mitigate the effects of trivial solutions to ill-posed registration problems and to otherwise ensure the resulting deformation fields are well-behaved. This paper introduces a novel deformable registration algorithm, RANCOR, which uses iterative convexification to address deformable registration problems under total-variation regularization. Initial comparative results against four state-of…
A Hybrid Deep Feature-Based Deformable Image Registration Method for Pathology Images
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院);School of Mathematics, Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学数学学院);Stanford University(斯坦福大学);Guangdong Medical University(广东医科大学);Xiaohe Healthcare ByteDance(字节跳动小河医疗)
GSMorph: Gradient Surgery for cine-MRI Cardiac Deformable Registration
University of Leeds(利兹大学);Radboud University Medical Centre(拉德堡德大学医学中心);Netherlands Cancer Institute(荷兰癌症研究所);Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Shenzhen RayShape Medical Technology Co., Ltd(深圳睿心医疗科技有限公司)
University of Basel(巴塞尔大学);University of Basel Hospital(巴塞尔大学医院);Inselspital, Bern University Hospital(伯尔尼大学医院 Inselspital);University of Bern(伯尔尼大学)
Parametric spatial transformation models have been successfully applied to image registration tasks. In such models, the transformation of interest is parameterized by a fixed set of basis functions as for example B-splines. Each basis function is located on a fixed regular grid position among the image domain, because the transformation of interest is not known in advance. As a consequence, not all basis functions will necessarily contribute to the final transformation which results in a non-compact representation of the transformation. We reformulate the pairwise registration problem as a re…
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes(约翰斯·霍普金斯医学研究所);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学);NVIDIA Corporation(英伟达公司)
Transformers have recently shown promise for medical image applications, leading to an increasing interest in developing such models for medical image registration. Recent advancements in designing registration Transformers have focused on using cross-attention (CA) to enable a more precise understanding of spatial correspondences between moving and fixed images. Here, we propose a novel CA mechanism that computes windowed attention using deformable windows. In contrast to existing CA mechanisms that require intensive computational complexity by either computing CA globally or locally with a f…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学)
Registration of pre-operative and post-recurrence brain images is often needed to evaluate the effectiveness of brain gliomas treatment. While recent deep learning-based deformable registration methods have achieved remarkable success with healthy brain images, most of them would be unable to accurately align images with pathologies due to the absent correspondences in the reference image. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based deformable registration method that jointly estimates regions with absent correspondence and bidirectional deformation fields. A forward-backward consistency c…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学)
Recent deep learning-based methods have shown promising results and runtime advantages in deformable image registration. However, analyzing the effects of hyperparameters and searching for optimal regularization parameters prove to be too prohibitive in deep learning-based methods. This is because it involves training a substantial number of separate models with distinct hyperparameter values. In this paper, we propose a conditional image registration method and a new self-supervised learning paradigm for deep deformable image registration. By learning the conditional features that are correla…
University of Lübeck(吕贝克大学);Fraunhofer MEVIS(弗劳恩霍夫医学影像计算研究所)
Low-rank and sparse decompositions and robust PCA (RPCA) are highly successful techniques in image processing and have recently found use in groupwise image registration. In this paper, we investigate the drawbacks of the most common RPCA-dissimi\-larity metric in image registration and derive an improved version. In particular, this new metric models low-rank requirements through explicit constraints instead of penalties and thus avoids the pitfalls of the established metric. Equipped with total variation regularization, we present a theoretically justified multilevel scheme based on first-or…
University of Freiburg(弗莱堡大学);German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)(德国癌症联盟(DKTK))
Deformable image registration is a very important field of research in medical imaging. Recently multiple deep learning approaches were published in this area showing promising results. However, drawbacks of deep learning methods are the need for a large amount of training datasets and their inability to register unseen images different from the training datasets. One shot learning comes without the need of large training datasets and has already been proven to be applicable to 3D data. In this work we present a one shot registration approach for periodic motion tracking in 3D and 4D datasets.…
Deformable image registration is a fundamental task in medical image analysis, aiming to establish a dense and non-linear correspondence between a pair of images. Previous deep-learning studies usually employ supervised neural networks to directly learn the spatial transformation from one image to another, requiring task-specific ground-truth registration for model training. Due to the difficulty in collecting precise ground-truth registration, implementation of these supervised methods is practically challenging. Although several unsupervised networks have been recently developed, these metho…