LEARNING MRI CONTRAST-AGNOSTIC REGISTRATION

We introduce a strategy for learning image registration without acquired imaging data, producing powerful networks agnostic to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast. While classical methods accurately estimate the spatial correspondence between images, they solve an optimization problem for every new image pair. Learning methods are fast at test time but limited to images with contrasts and geometric content similar to those seen during training. We propose to remove this dependency using a generative strategy that exposes networks to a wide range of images synthesized from segmentations during training, forcing them to generalize across contrasts. We show that networks trained within this framework generalize to a broad array of unseen MRI contrasts and surpass classical state-of-the-art brain registration accuracy by up to 12.4 Dice points for a variety of tested contrast combinations. Critically, training on arbitrary shapes synthesized from noise distributions results in competitive performance, removing the dependency on acquired data of any kind. Additionally, since anatomical label maps are often available for the anatomy of interest, we show that synthesizing images from these dramatically boosts performance, while still avoiding the need for real intensity images during training.