Unsupervised Imbalanced Registration for Enhancing Accuracy and Stability in Medical Image Registration.

BACKGROUND:Medical image registration plays an important role in several applications. Existing approaches using unsupervised learning encounter issues due to the data imbalance problem, as their target is usually a continuous variable. OBJECTIVE:In this study, we introduce a novel approach known as Unsupervised Imbalanced Registration, to address the challenge of data imbalance and prevent overconfidence while increasing the accuracy and stability of 4D image registration. METHODS:Our approach involves performing unsupervised image mixtures to smooth the input space, followed by unsupervised image registration to learn the continual target. We evaluated our method on 4D-Lung using two widely used unsupervised methods, namely VoxelMorph and ViT-V-Net. RESULTS:Our findings demonstrate that our proposed method significantly enhances the mean accuracy of registration by 3%-10% on a small dataset while also reducing the accuracy variance by 10%. CONCLUSION:Unsupervised Imbalanced Registration is a promising approach that is compatible with current unsupervised image registration methods applied to 4D images.