We present recursive cascaded networks, a general architecture that enables
learning deep cascades, for deformable image registration. The proposed
architecture is simple in design and can be built on any base network. The
moving image is warped successively by each cascade and finally aligned to the
fixed image; this procedure is recursive in a way that every cascade learns to
perform a progressive deformation for the current warped image. The entire
system is end-to-end and jointly trained in an unsupervised manner. In
addition, enabled by the recursive architecture, one cascade can be iteratively
applied for multiple times during testing, which approaches a better fit
between each of the image pairs. We evaluate our method on 3D medical images,
where deformable registration is most commonly applied. We demonstrate that
recursive cascaded networks achieve consistent, significant gains and
outperform state-of-the-art methods. The performance reveals an increasing
trend as long as more cascades are trained, while the limit is not observed.
Code is available at this https URL

本文介绍了一种名为递归级联网络（recursive cascaded networks）的通用体系结构，可用于可变形图像配准。所提出的体系结构设计简单，可以建立在任何基础网络之上。整个系统是端到端的，并以无监督的方式共同训练。我们在 3D 医学图像上评估了我们的方法，在性能上表现出一致、显著的提高，并且优于最先进的方法。该方法的性能与级联的数量成正比，缺乏极限。