AtlasMorph: Learning conditional deformable templates for brain MRI

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rakic, Marianne, Hoopes, Andrew, Abulnaga, S. Mazdak, Sabuncu, Mert R., Guttag, John V., Dalca, Adrian V.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rakic, Marianne
Hoopes, Andrew
Abulnaga, S. Mazdak
Sabuncu, Mert R.
Guttag, John V.
Dalca, Adrian V.
author_facet Rakic, Marianne
Hoopes, Andrew
Abulnaga, S. Mazdak
Sabuncu, Mert R.
Guttag, John V.
Dalca, Adrian V.
contents Deformable templates, or atlases, are images that represent a prototypical anatomy for a population, and are often enhanced with probabilistic anatomical label maps. They are commonly used in medical image analysis for population studies and computational anatomy tasks such as registration and segmentation. Because developing a template is a computationally expensive process, relatively few templates are available. As a result, analysis is often conducted with sub-optimal templates that are not truly representative of the study population, especially when there are large variations within this population. We propose a machine learning framework that uses convolutional registration neural networks to efficiently learn a function that outputs templates conditioned on subject-specific attributes, such as age and sex. We also leverage segmentations, when available, to produce anatomical segmentation maps for the resulting templates. The learned network can also be used to register subject images to the templates. We demonstrate our method on a compilation of 3D brain MRI datasets, and show that it can learn high-quality templates that are representative of populations. We find that annotated conditional templates enable better registration than their unlabeled unconditional counterparts, and outperform other templates construction methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_13609
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AtlasMorph: Learning conditional deformable templates for brain MRI
Rakic, Marianne
Hoopes, Andrew
Abulnaga, S. Mazdak
Sabuncu, Mert R.
Guttag, John V.
Dalca, Adrian V.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Deformable templates, or atlases, are images that represent a prototypical anatomy for a population, and are often enhanced with probabilistic anatomical label maps. They are commonly used in medical image analysis for population studies and computational anatomy tasks such as registration and segmentation. Because developing a template is a computationally expensive process, relatively few templates are available. As a result, analysis is often conducted with sub-optimal templates that are not truly representative of the study population, especially when there are large variations within this population. We propose a machine learning framework that uses convolutional registration neural networks to efficiently learn a function that outputs templates conditioned on subject-specific attributes, such as age and sex. We also leverage segmentations, when available, to produce anatomical segmentation maps for the resulting templates. The learned network can also be used to register subject images to the templates. We demonstrate our method on a compilation of 3D brain MRI datasets, and show that it can learn high-quality templates that are representative of populations. We find that annotated conditional templates enable better registration than their unlabeled unconditional counterparts, and outperform other templates construction methods.
title AtlasMorph: Learning conditional deformable templates for brain MRI
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13609