3D medical image registration is of great clinical importance. However, supervised learning methods require a large amount of accurately annotated corresponding control points (or morphing). The ground truth for 3D medical images is very difficult to obtain. Unsupervised learning methods ease the burden of manual annotation by exploiting unlabeled data without supervision. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised learning method using convolutional neural networks under an end-to-end framework, Volume Tweening Network (VTN), to register 3D medical images. Three technical components ameliorate our unsupervised learning system for 3D end-to-end medical image registration: (1) We cascade the registration subnetworks; (2) We integrate affine registration into our network; and (3) We incorporate an additional invertibility loss into the training process. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is 880x faster (or 3.3x faster without GPU acceleration) than traditional optimization-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in medical image registration.

该研究论文提出了一种新的无监督学习方法，使用卷积神经网络在端到端框架下进行三维医学图像配准，通过三个创新技术组件实现高性能，并且实验证明其在医学图像配准方面优于传统的基于优化的方法。

无监督三维端到端医学图像配准与体积缓动网络