text: Limited capture range, and the requirement to provide high quality initialization for optimization-based 2D 3D image registration methods, can significantly degrade the performance of 3D image reconstruction and motion compensation pipelines. Challenging clinical imaging scenarios, which contain significant subject motion such as fet al in-utero imaging, complicate the 3D image and volume reconstruction process. In this paper we present a learning based image registration method capable of predicting 3D rigid transformations of arbitrarily oriented 2D image slices, with respect to a learned canonical atlas co-ordinate system. Only image slice intensity information is used to perform registration and canonical alignment, no spatial transform initialization is required. To find image transformations we utilize a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to learn the regression function capable of mapping 2D image slices to a 3D canonical atlas space. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our approach quantitatively on simulated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), fet al brain imagery with synthetic motion and further demonstrate qualitative results on real fet al MRI data where our method is integrated into a full reconstruction and motion compensation pipeline. Our learning based registration achieves an average spatial prediction error of 7 mm on simulated data and produces qualitatively improved reconstructions for heavily moving fetuses with gestational ages of approximately 20 weeks. Our model provides a general and computationally efficient solution to the 2D 3D registration initialization problem and is suitable for real-time scenarios.
  @cite_30: In this paper, we present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) regression approach to address the two major limitations of existing intensity-based 2-D 3-D registration technology: 1) slow computation and 2) small capture range. Different from optimization-based methods, which iteratively optimize the transformation parameters over a scalar-valued metric function representing the quality of the registration, the proposed method exploits the information embedded in the appearances of the digitally reconstructed radiograph and X-ray images, and employs CNN regressors to directly estimate the transformation parameters. An automatic feature extraction step is introduced to calculate 3-D pose-indexed features that are sensitive to the variables to be regressed while robust to other factors. The CNN regressors are then trained for local zones and applied in a hierarchical manner to break down the complex regression task into multiple simpler sub-tasks that can be learned separately. Weight sharing is furthermore employed in the CNN regression model to reduce the memory footprint. The proposed approach has been quantitatively evaluated on 3 potential clinical applications, demonstrating its significant advantage in providing highly accurate real-time 2-D 3-D registration with a significantly enlarged capture range when compared to intensity-based methods.
summary: @cite_30 use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to automatically estimate the spatial arrangement of landmarks in projection images. Their method utilizes a CNN to regress transformation residuals, @math , which refines the required transformation to register a source volume to a target X-ray image from an initially assumed position @math . Registration is then performed iteratively using synthetic Digitally Reconstructed Radiography (DRR) images generated from the source volume using @math . To address inaccurate transformation mappings caused by direct regression of transformation parameters, train their CNN using Pose-index features (landmarks) extracted from source and target image pairs and learn their @math . Pose-index features are insensitive to transform parameters @math yet sensitive to change in @math . This insensitivity to @math can be expressed as @math . The method requires a robust landmark detection algorithm, which is domain and scanner specific and the detection quality degrades for motion-corrupted data.