A multi-view assisted registration network for MRI registration pre- and post-therapy.

Abstract

Image registration of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pre- and post-therapy is an important part of evaluating the effect of therapy in tumor patients. The accuracy of evaluation results heavily relies on the alignment of the MRI image after registration. Although recent advancements have been made in medical image registration, applying these methods to MRI registration pre- and post-therapy remains challenging. Existing methods typically utilize single-view data for registration. However, when applied to MRI data where some slices are clear while others are blurred, these methods can be misled by erroneous spatial information in the blurred regions, leading to poor registration outcomes. To mitigate the interference caused by erroneous spatial information in single-view data, this paper proposes a multi-stream fusion-assisted registration network that incorporates different-view MRIs of the same patient at the same site. Additionally, a cross-attention guided fusion module is designed within the network to effectively utilize accurate spatial information from multi-view data. The proposed approach was evaluated on clinical data, and the experimental results demonstrated that incorporating multiple view data as auxiliary information significantly enhances the accuracy of MRI image registration before and after radiotherapy.