Benchmarking Intra-Patient 3D Deformable Multimodal Image Registration

2026-09-14

AI Summary

研究评估了多种3D多模态可变形配准方法，针对不同解剖区域的数据集，采用了几何与基于图像的度量标准，揭示了当前方法在全局结构一致性上的局限性。

Abstract

Multimodal image registration is a key component of many clinical workflows, yet it remains challenging because corresponding anatomical structures often exhibit substantially different image intensities across modalities. In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark of intra-patient 3D multimodal deformable registration methods across three datasets covering different anatomical regions and difficulty levels, including both synthetic deformation recovery and real clinical scenarios. We evaluate classical optimization-based approaches and modern learning-based methods, including recent deep learning and foundation models, using complementary metrics: Average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), average 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95), and a modality-independent structural similarity measure based on the MIND self-similarity context (MIND-SSC). Results show high variability across datasets, with learning-based methods demonstrating superior performance on large synthetic benchmarks, while only limited improvements are observed in real pelvic registration. A key finding of this study is the consistent disagreement between geometric metrics (DSC, HD95) and image-based similarity metrics (MIND-SSC), highlighting that improved overlap does not necessarily imply better global multimodal correspondence. Furthermore, anatomy-guided approaches achieve the highest overlap scores but exhibit degraded performance outside of segmented regions, revealing a trade-off between label-driven alignment and global structural coherence. Overall, our results indicate that no current method achieves robust performance across anatomies and modalities. We demonstrate that intra-patient 3D multimodal registration requires multi-criteria evaluation, including deformation-based metrics, and remains an open problem.

Problem

• multimodal image registration
• deformable registration
• intra-patient
• benchmark
• cross-modality

Innovation

• multimodal image registration
• learning-based methods
• geometric metrics
• image-based similarity metrics
• multi-criteria evaluation