Medical image registration using machine learning-based interest point detector

This paper presents a feature-based image registration framework which exploits a novel machine learning (ML)-based interest point detection (IPD) algorithm for feature selection and correspondence detection. We use a feed-forward neural network (NN) with back-propagation as our base ML detector. Literature on ML-based IPD is scarce and to our best knowledge no previous research has addressed feature selection strategy for IPD purpose with cross-validation (CV) detectability measure. Our target application is the registration of clinical abdominal CT scans with abnormal anatomies. We evaluated the correspondence detection performance of the proposed ML-based detector against two well-known IPD algorithms: SIFT and SURF. The proposed method is capable of performing affine rigid registrations of 2D and 3D CT images, demonstrating more than two times better accuracy in correspondence detection than SIFT and SURF. The registration accuracy has been validated manually using identified landmark points. Our experimental results shows an improvement in 3D image registration quality of 18.92% compared with affine transformation image registration method from standard ITK affine registration toolkit.