Deformable registration of clinical scans is a fundamental task for many applications, such as population studies or the monitoring of long-term disease progression in individual patients. This task is challenging because, in contrast to high-resolution research-quality scans, clinical images are often sparse, missing up to 85\% of the slices in comparison. Furthermore, the anatomy in the acquired slices is not consistent across scansbecause of variations in patient orientation with respect to the scanner. In this work, we introduce Sparse VoxelMorph (SparseVM), which adapts a state-of-the-art learning-based registration method to improve the registration of sparse clinical images. SparseVM is a fast, unsupervised method that weights voxel contributions to registration in proportion to confidence in the voxels. This leads to improved registration performance on volumes with voxels of varying reliability, such as interpolated clinical scans . SparseVM registers 3D scans in under a second on the GPU, which is orders of magnitudes faster than the best performing clinical registration methods, while still achieving comparable accuracy. Because of its short runtimes and accurate behavior, SparseVM can enable clinical analyses not previously possible. The code is publicly available at voxelmorph.mit.edu.
We introduce SparseVM, a method to register clinical 3D scans faster and more accurately than previously possible. Deformable alignment, or registration, of clinical scans is a fundamental task for many medical image applications such as longitudinal population studies. Most registration algorithms are designed for high-resolution research-quality scans and under-perform when applied to clinical data. Clinical scans present unique challenges because, in contrast to research-quality scans, clinical scans are often sparse, missing up to 85\% of the slices available in research scans. We build on a state-of-the-art learning-based registration method to improve the accuracy of sparse clinical image registration and demonstrate our method on a clinically-acquired MRI dataset of stroke patients . SparseVM registers 3D scans in under a second on a GPU, which is over 1000x faster than the most accurate clinical registration methods, without compromising accuracy. Because of this, SparseVM enables clinical analyses that were not previously possible. The code is publicly available at voxelmorph.mit.edu.
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We introduce SparseVM, a method to register clinical 3D scans faster and more accurately than previously possible. Deformable alignment, or registration,
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applications, such as population studies or the monitoring of long-term disease progression in individual patients. This task is challenging
medical image applications such as longitudinal population studies. Most registration algorithms are designed for high-resolution research-quality scans and under-perform when applied to clinical data. Clinical scans present unique challenges
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images. SparseVM is a fast, unsupervised method that weights voxel contributions to registration in proportion to confidence in the voxels. This leads to improved registration performance on volumes with voxels of varying reliability, such as interpolated clinical scans
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its short runtimes and accurate behavior, SparseVM can enable clinical analyses
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