SETGen: Scalable and Efficient Template Generation Framework for Groupwise Medical Image Registration

Template generation is a crucial step of groupwise image registration which deforms a group of subjects into a common space. Existing traditional and deep learning-based methods can generate high-quality template images. However, they suffer from substantial time costs or limited application scenarios like fixed group size. In this paper, we propose an efficient groupwise template generative framework based on variational autoencoder models utilizing the arithmetic property of latent representation of input images. We acquire the latent vectors of each input and use the average vector to construct the template through the decoder. Therefore, the method can be applied to groups of any scale. Secondly, we explore a siamese training scheme that feeds two images to the shared-weight twin networks and compares the distances between inputs and the generated template to prompt the template to be close to the implicit center. We conduct experiments on 3D brain MRI scans of groups of different sizes. Results show that our framework can achieve comparable and even better performance to baselines, with runtime decreased to seconds.