• Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences
  • Vol. 18, Issue 1, 2450022 (2025)
Qing Huang1, Lei Ren1, Tingwei Quan2,*, Minglei Yang3..., Hongmei Yuan3 and Kai Cao4,**|Show fewer author(s)
Author Affiliations
  • 1School of Computer Science & Engineering, Hubei Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robot, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430205, P. R. China
  • 2Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Huazhong, University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, P. R. China
  • 3Beijing Wandong Medical Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing 100015, P. R. China
  • 4Changhai Hospital of Shanghai, Shanghai 200433, P. R. China
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    DOI: 10.1142/S1793545824500226 Cite this Article
    Qing Huang, Lei Ren, Tingwei Quan, Minglei Yang, Hongmei Yuan, Kai Cao. MA-VoxelMorph: Multi-scale attention-based VoxelMorph for nonrigid registration of thoracoabdominal CT images[J]. Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, 2025, 18(1): 2450022 Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    This paper aims to develop a nonrigid registration method of preoperative and intraoperative thoracoabdominal CT images in computer-assisted interventional surgeries for accurate tumor localization and tissue visualization enhancement. However, fine structure registration of complex thoracoabdominal organs and large deformation registration caused by respiratory motion is challenging. To deal with this problem, we propose a 3D multi-scale attention VoxelMorph (MA-VoxelMorph) registration network. To alleviate the large deformation problem, a multi-scale axial attention mechanism is utilized by using a residual dilated pyramid pooling for multi-scale feature extraction, and position-aware axial attention for long-distance dependencies between pixels capture. To further improve the large deformation and fine structure registration results, a multi-scale context channel attention mechanism is employed utilizing content information via adjacent encoding layers. Our method was evaluated on four public lung datasets (DIR-Lab dataset, Creatis dataset, Learn2Reg dataset, OASIS dataset) and a local dataset. Results proved that the proposed method achieved better registration performance than current state-of-the-art methods, especially in handling the registration of large deformations and fine structures. It also proved to be fast in 3D image registration, using about 1.5 s, and faster than most methods. Qualitative and quantitative assessments proved that the proposed MA-VoxelMorph has the potential to realize precise and fast tumor localization in clinical interventional surgeries.
    Qing Huang, Lei Ren, Tingwei Quan, Minglei Yang, Hongmei Yuan, Kai Cao. MA-VoxelMorph: Multi-scale attention-based VoxelMorph for nonrigid registration of thoracoabdominal CT images[J]. Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, 2025, 18(1): 2450022
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