SymReg-GAN: Symmetric Image Registration with Generative Adversarial Networks

Symmetric image registration estimates bi-directional spatial transformations between images while enforcing an inverse-consistency. Its capability of eliminating bias introduced inevitably by generic single-directional image registration allows more precise analysis in different interdisciplinary applications of image registration, e.g., computational anatomy and shape analysis. However, most existing symmetric registration techniques especially for multimodal images are limited by low speed from the commonly-used iterative optimization, hardship in exploring inter-modality relations or high labor cost for labeling data. We propose SymReg-GAN to shatter these limits, which is a novel generative adversarial networks (GAN) based approach to symmetric image registration. We formulate symmetric registration of unimodal/multimodal images as a conditional GAN and train it with a semi-supervised strategy. The registration symmetry is realized by introducing a loss for encouraging that the cycle composed of the geometric transformation from one image to another and its reverse should bring an image back. The semi-supervised learning enables both the precious labeled data and large amounts of unlabeled data to be fully exploited. Experimental results from six public brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets and 1 our own computed tomography (CT) and MRI dataset demonstrate the superiority of SymReg-GAN to several existing state-of-the-art methods.