MF-PEAR-net: a multi-scale feature guided project-&-excite affine registration network for CT images
摘要
Multiple CT screenings are required to assess the progression of lung lesions, and this process involves accurately and precisely aligning two CT images. This is a tedious and difficult task for clinicians due to a number of numerous factors such as scanning device inconsistencies and body postures during the CT scanning process. This study introduces a Multi-depth-wise separable and Multi-scale feature guided Multi-resolution Projection and Excitation Affine Registration Network, MF-PEAR-net, for unsupervised 3D affine registration of medical images by optimizing the similarity loss. A multi-depth-wise separable kernel module is designed and used in place of the traditional convolution blocks to extract more extensive image features. A hierarchical multi-scale feature aggregation module is proposed fuse the extracted multi-scale features. The fused feature map is used to guide the re-calibration of the extracted features using a multi-scale feature guided project-and-excite module. Furthermore, the re-calibrated features at multiple scales are utilized by performing a dot product between two feature vectors, in order to improve the robustness of image representation. Extensive comparison experiments are performed on the proposed model and the recent state-of-the-art affine registration methods on two publicly available datasets that are pertinent to lung CT image registration, DIR-Lab and Learn2Reg. Results from quantitative and qualitative comparisons show that our model performs better than the single-step affine registration networks that are currently in use. The source code is available at: https://github.com/bonaldo112/MF-PEAR-Net/.