Effective Feature Learning for 3D Medical Registration via Domain-Specialized DINO Pretraining

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Hauptverfasser: Kats, Eytan, Heinrich, Mattias P.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kats, Eytan
Heinrich, Mattias P.
author_facet Kats, Eytan
Heinrich, Mattias P.
contents Medical image registration is a critical component of clinical imaging workflows, enabling accurate longitudinal assessment, multi-modal data fusion, and image-guided interventions. Intensity-based approaches often struggle with interscanner variability and complex anatomical deformations, whereas feature-based methods offer improved robustness by leveraging semantically informed representations. In this work, we investigate DINO-style self-supervised pretraining directly on 3D medical imaging data, aiming to learn dense volumetric features well suited for deformable registration. We assess the resulting representations on challenging interpatient abdominal registration task across both MRI and CT modalities. Our domain-specialized pretraining outperforms the DINOv2 model trained on a large-scale collection of natural images, while requiring substantially lower computational resources at inference time. Moreover, it surpasses established registration models under out-of-domain evaluation, demonstrating the value of task-agnostic yet medical imaging-focused pretraining for robust and efficient 3D image registration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14086
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Effective Feature Learning for 3D Medical Registration via Domain-Specialized DINO Pretraining
Kats, Eytan
Heinrich, Mattias P.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Medical image registration is a critical component of clinical imaging workflows, enabling accurate longitudinal assessment, multi-modal data fusion, and image-guided interventions. Intensity-based approaches often struggle with interscanner variability and complex anatomical deformations, whereas feature-based methods offer improved robustness by leveraging semantically informed representations. In this work, we investigate DINO-style self-supervised pretraining directly on 3D medical imaging data, aiming to learn dense volumetric features well suited for deformable registration. We assess the resulting representations on challenging interpatient abdominal registration task across both MRI and CT modalities. Our domain-specialized pretraining outperforms the DINOv2 model trained on a large-scale collection of natural images, while requiring substantially lower computational resources at inference time. Moreover, it surpasses established registration models under out-of-domain evaluation, demonstrating the value of task-agnostic yet medical imaging-focused pretraining for robust and efficient 3D image registration.
title Effective Feature Learning for 3D Medical Registration via Domain-Specialized DINO Pretraining
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14086