A Cooperative Autoencoder for Population-Based Regularization of CNN Image Registration

Spatial transformations are enablers in a variety of medical image analysis applications that entail aligning images to a common coordinate systems. Population analysis of such transformations is expected to capture the underlying image and shape variations, and hence these transformations are required to produce anatomically feasible correspondences. This is usually enforced through some smoothness-based generic metric or regularization of the deformation field. Alternatively, population-based regularization has been shown to produce anatomically accurate correspondences in cases where anatomically unaware (i.e., data independent) regularization fail. Recently, deep networks have been used to generate spatial transformations in an unsupervised manner, and, once trained, these networks are computationally faster and as accurate as conventional, optimization-based registration methods. However, the deformation fields produced by these networks require smoothness penalties, just as the conventional registration methods, and ignores population-level statistics of the transformations. Here, we propose a novel neural network architecture that simultaneously learns and uses the population-level statistics of the spatial transformations to regularize the neural networks for unsupervised image registration. This regularization is in the form of a bottleneck autoencoder, which learns and adapts to the population of transformations required to align input images by encoding the transformations to a low dimensional manifold. The proposed architecture produces deformation fields that describe the population-level features and associated correspondences in an anatomically relevant manner and are statistically compact relative to the state-of-the-art approaches while maintaining computational efficiency. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on synthetic data sets, as well as 2D and 3D medical data.