TransMorph: Transformer for unsupervised medical image registration

Junyu Chen, Eric C Frey, Yufan He, William P Segars, Ye Li, Yong Du
Medical image analysis, 82, 102615, 2022.

Summary

In the last decade, convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have been a major focus of research in medical image analysis. However, the performances of ConvNets may be limited by a lack of explicit consideration of the long-range spatial relationships in an image. Recently, Vision Transformer architectures have been proposed to address the shortcomings of ConvNets and have produced state-of-the-art performances in many medical imaging applications. Transformers may be a strong candidate for image registration because their substantially larger receptive field enables a more precise comprehension of the spatial correspondence between moving and fixed images. Here, we present TransMorph, a hybrid Transformer-ConvNet model for volumetric medical image registration. This paper also presents diffeomorphic and Bayesian variants of TransMorph: the diffeomorphic variants ensure the topology-preserving deformations, and the Bayesian variant produces a well-calibrated registration uncertainty estimate.

Network architecture

TransMorph architecture

Qualitative results

Qualitative results on IXI dataset

Registration accuracy

Registration accuracy (Dice score) on IXI dataset

BibTex

@article{chen2022transmorph,
title={Transmorph: Transformer for unsupervised medical image registration},
author={Chen, Junyu and Frey, Eric C and He, Yufan and Segars, William P and Li, Ye and Du, Yong},
journal={Medical image analysis},
volume={82},
pages={102615},
year={2022},
publisher={Elsevier}
}