Adaptive Image Registration: A Hybrid Approach Integrating Deep Learning and Optimization Functions for Enhanced Precision

Image registration has traditionally been done using two distinct approaches: learning based methods, relying on robust deep neural networks, and optimization-based methods, applying complex mathematical transformations to warp images accordingly. Of course, both paradigms offer advantages and disadvantages, and, in this work, we seek to combine their respective strengths into a single streamlined framework, using the outputs of the learning based method as initial parameters for optimization while prioritizing computational power for the image pairs that offer the greatest loss. Our investigations showed that an improvement of 0.3\% in testing when utilizing the best performing state-of-the-art model as the backbone of the framework, while maintaining the same inference time and with only a 0.8\% loss in deformation field smoothness.