Spatial regularisation for improved accuracy and interpretability in keypoint-based registration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Billot, Benjamin, Muthukrishnan, Ramya, Abaci-Turk, Esra, Grant, P. Ellen, Ayache, Nicholas, Delingette, Hervé, Golland, Polina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Billot, Benjamin
Muthukrishnan, Ramya
Abaci-Turk, Esra
Grant, P. Ellen
Ayache, Nicholas
Delingette, Hervé
Golland, Polina
author_facet Billot, Benjamin
Muthukrishnan, Ramya
Abaci-Turk, Esra
Grant, P. Ellen
Ayache, Nicholas
Delingette, Hervé
Golland, Polina
contents Unsupervised registration strategies bypass requirements in ground truth transforms or segmentations by optimising similarity metrics between fixed and moved volumes. Among these methods, a recent subclass of approaches based on unsupervised keypoint detection stand out as very promising for interpretability. Specifically, these methods train a network to predict feature maps for fixed and moving images, from which explainable centres of mass are computed to obtain point clouds, that are then aligned in closed-form. However, the features returned by the network often yield spatially diffuse patterns that are hard to interpret, thus undermining the purpose of keypoint-based registration. Here, we propose a three-fold loss to regularise the spatial distribution of the features. First, we use the KL divergence to model features as point spread functions that we interpret as probabilistic keypoints. Then, we sharpen the spatial distributions of these features to increase the precision of the detected landmarks. Finally, we introduce a new repulsive loss across keypoints to encourage spatial diversity. Overall, our loss considerably improves the interpretability of the features, which now correspond to precise and anatomically meaningful landmarks. We demonstrate our three-fold loss in foetal rigid motion tracking and brain MRI affine registration tasks, where it not only outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised strategies, but also bridges the gap with state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/BenBillot/spatial_regularisation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04499
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spatial regularisation for improved accuracy and interpretability in keypoint-based registration
Billot, Benjamin
Muthukrishnan, Ramya
Abaci-Turk, Esra
Grant, P. Ellen
Ayache, Nicholas
Delingette, Hervé
Golland, Polina
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Unsupervised registration strategies bypass requirements in ground truth transforms or segmentations by optimising similarity metrics between fixed and moved volumes. Among these methods, a recent subclass of approaches based on unsupervised keypoint detection stand out as very promising for interpretability. Specifically, these methods train a network to predict feature maps for fixed and moving images, from which explainable centres of mass are computed to obtain point clouds, that are then aligned in closed-form. However, the features returned by the network often yield spatially diffuse patterns that are hard to interpret, thus undermining the purpose of keypoint-based registration. Here, we propose a three-fold loss to regularise the spatial distribution of the features. First, we use the KL divergence to model features as point spread functions that we interpret as probabilistic keypoints. Then, we sharpen the spatial distributions of these features to increase the precision of the detected landmarks. Finally, we introduce a new repulsive loss across keypoints to encourage spatial diversity. Overall, our loss considerably improves the interpretability of the features, which now correspond to precise and anatomically meaningful landmarks. We demonstrate our three-fold loss in foetal rigid motion tracking and brain MRI affine registration tasks, where it not only outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised strategies, but also bridges the gap with state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/BenBillot/spatial_regularisation.
title Spatial regularisation for improved accuracy and interpretability in keypoint-based registration
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04499