Towards robust CT-ultrasound registration using deep learning methods

Multi-modal registration, especially CT/MR to ultrasound (US), is still a challenge, as conventional similarity metrics such as mutual information do not match the imaging characteristics of ultrasound. The main motivation for this work is to investigate whether a deep learning network can be used to directly estimate the displacement between a pair of multi-modal image patches, without explicitly performing similarity metric and optimizer, the two main components in a registration framework. The proposed DVNet is a fully convolutional neural network and is trained using a large set of artificially generated displacement vectors (DVs). The DVNet was evaluated on mono- and simulated multi-modal data, as well as real CT and US liver slices (selected from 3D volumes). The results show that the DVNet is quite robust on the single- and multi-modal (simulated) data, but does not work yet on the real CT and US images.

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