Coarse-to-Fine Joint Registration of MR and Ultrasound Images via Imaging Style Transfer

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel coarse-to-fine registration pipeline for aligning pre-surgery MR images with post-resection US images, utilizing style transfer with CycleGAN to improve registration accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a new method combining unpaired style transfer and multi-stage registration for better MR-US image alignment.

Findings

Improved consistency between MR and US image pairs.

Effective use of 3D CycleGAN for synthetic image generation.

Enhanced registration accuracy in most cases.

Abstract

We developed a pipeline for registering pre-surgery Magnetic Resonance (MR) images and post-resection Ultrasound (US) images. Our approach leverages unpaired style transfer using 3D CycleGAN to generate synthetic T1 images, thereby enhancing registration performance. Additionally, our registration process employs both affine and local deformable transformations for a coarse-to-fine registration. The results demonstrate that our approach improves the consistency between MR and US image pairs in most cases.