GuidedMorph: Two-Stage Deformable Registration for Breast MRI

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Yaqian, Gu, Hanxue, Dong, Haoyu, Li, Qihang, Chen, Yuwen, Konz, Nicholas, Li, Lin, Mazurowski, Maciej A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917174704078848
author Chen, Yaqian
Gu, Hanxue
Dong, Haoyu
Li, Qihang
Chen, Yuwen
Konz, Nicholas
Li, Lin
Mazurowski, Maciej A.
author_facet Chen, Yaqian
Gu, Hanxue
Dong, Haoyu
Li, Qihang
Chen, Yuwen
Konz, Nicholas
Li, Lin
Mazurowski, Maciej A.
contents Accurately registering breast MR images from different time points enables the alignment of anatomical structures and tracking of tumor progression, supporting more effective breast cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment planning. However, the complexity of dense tissue and its highly non-rigid nature pose challenges for conventional registration methods, which primarily focus on aligning general structures while overlooking intricate internal details. To address this, we propose \textbf{GuidedMorph}, a novel two-stage registration framework designed to better align dense tissue. In addition to a single-scale network for global structure alignment, we introduce a framework that utilizes dense tissue information to track breast movement. The learned transformation fields are fused by introducing the Dual Spatial Transformer Network (DSTN), improving overall alignment accuracy. A novel warping method based on the Euclidean distance transform (EDT) is also proposed to accurately warp the registered dense tissue and breast masks, preserving fine structural details during deformation. The framework supports paradigms that require external segmentation models and with image data only. It also operates effectively with the VoxelMorph and TransMorph backbones, offering a versatile solution for breast registration. We validate our method on ISPY2 and internal dataset, demonstrating superior performance in dense tissue, overall breast alignment, and breast structural similarity index measure (SSIM), with notable improvements by over 13.01% in dense tissue Dice, 3.13% in breast Dice, and 1.21% in breast SSIM compared to the best learning-based baseline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13414
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GuidedMorph: Two-Stage Deformable Registration for Breast MRI
Chen, Yaqian
Gu, Hanxue
Dong, Haoyu
Li, Qihang
Chen, Yuwen
Konz, Nicholas
Li, Lin
Mazurowski, Maciej A.
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurately registering breast MR images from different time points enables the alignment of anatomical structures and tracking of tumor progression, supporting more effective breast cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment planning. However, the complexity of dense tissue and its highly non-rigid nature pose challenges for conventional registration methods, which primarily focus on aligning general structures while overlooking intricate internal details. To address this, we propose \textbf{GuidedMorph}, a novel two-stage registration framework designed to better align dense tissue. In addition to a single-scale network for global structure alignment, we introduce a framework that utilizes dense tissue information to track breast movement. The learned transformation fields are fused by introducing the Dual Spatial Transformer Network (DSTN), improving overall alignment accuracy. A novel warping method based on the Euclidean distance transform (EDT) is also proposed to accurately warp the registered dense tissue and breast masks, preserving fine structural details during deformation. The framework supports paradigms that require external segmentation models and with image data only. It also operates effectively with the VoxelMorph and TransMorph backbones, offering a versatile solution for breast registration. We validate our method on ISPY2 and internal dataset, demonstrating superior performance in dense tissue, overall breast alignment, and breast structural similarity index measure (SSIM), with notable improvements by over 13.01% in dense tissue Dice, 3.13% in breast Dice, and 1.21% in breast SSIM compared to the best learning-based baseline.
title GuidedMorph: Two-Stage Deformable Registration for Breast MRI
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13414