GroupMorph: Medical Image Registration via Grouping Network with Contextual Fusion

Pyramid-based deformation decomposition is a promising registration framework, which gradually decomposes the deformation field into multi-resolution subfields for precise registration. However, most pyramid-based methods directly produce one subfield per resolution level, which does not fully depict the spatial deformation. In this paper, we propose a novel registration model, called GroupMorph. Different from typical pyramid-based methods, we adopt the grouping-combination strategy to predict deformation field at each resolution. Specifically, we perform group-wise correlation calculation to measure the similarities of grouped features. After that, n groups of deformation subfields with different receptive fields are predicted in parallel. By composing these subfields, a deformation field with multi-receptive field ranges is formed, which can effectively identify both large and small deformations. Meanwhile, a contextual fusion module is designed to fuse the contextual features and provide the inter-group information for the field estimator of the next level. By leveraging the inter-group correspondence, the synergy among deformation subfields is enhanced. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GroupMorph. Code is available at https://github.com/TVayne/GroupMorph.