Abstract
Background: Medical image registration plays an important role in several applications. Existing approaches using unsupervised learning encounter issues due to the data imbalance problem, as their target is usually a continuous variable.
Objective: In this study, we introduce a novel approach known as Unsupervised Imbalanced Registration, to address the challenge of data imbalance and prevent overconfidence while increasing the accuracy and stability of 4D image registration.
Methods: Our approach involves performing unsupervised image mixtures to smooth the input space, followed by unsupervised image registration to learn the continual target. We evaluated our method on 4D-Lung using two widely used unsupervised methods, namely VoxelMorph and ViT-V-Net.
Results: Our findings demonstrate that our proposed method significantly enhances the mean accuracy of registration by 3%-10% on a small dataset while also reducing the accuracy variance by 10%.
Conclusion: Unsupervised Imbalanced Registration is a promising approach that is compatible with current unsupervised image registration methods applied to 4D images.
