Learning Best Features for Deformable Registration of MR Brains

This paper presents a learning method to select best geometric features for deformable brain registration. Best geometric features are selected for each brain location, and used to reduce the ambiguity in image matching during the deformable registration. Best geometric features are obtained by solving an energy minimization problem that requires the features of corresponding points in the training samples to be similar, and the features of a point to be different from those of nearby points. By incorporating those learned best features into the framework of HAMMER registration algorithm, we achieved about 10% improvement of accuracy in estimating the simulated deformation fields, compared to that obtained by HAMMER. Also, on real MR brain images, we found visible improvement of registration in cortical regions.