Correlation Attention Registration Based on Deep Learning from Histopathology to MRI of Prostate

Deep learning offers a promising methodology for the registration of prostate cancer images from histopathology to MRI. We explored how to effectively leverage key information from images to achieve improved end-to-end registration. We developed an approach based on a correlation attention registration framework to register segmentation labels of histopathology onto MRI. The network was trained using paired prostate datasets of histopathology and MRI from the Cancer Imaging Archive. We introduced An L2-Pearson correlation layer to enhance feature matching. Furthermore, our model employed an enhanced attention regression network to distinguish between key and nonkey features. For data analysis, we used the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and a one-sample t-test, with the statistical significance level for the one-sample t-test set at 0.001. Compared with two other models (ProsRegNet and CNNGeo), our model exhibited improved performance in Dice coefficient, with increases of 9.893% and 2.753%, respectively. The Hausdorff distance was reduced by approximately 50% and 50%, while the average label error (ALE) was reduced by 0.389% and 15.021%. The proposed improved multimodal prostate registration framework demonstrated high performance in statistical analysis. The results indicate that our enhanced strategy significantly improves registration performance and enables faster registration of histopathological images of patients undergoing radical prostatectomy to preoperative MRI. More accurate registration can prevent over-diagnosing low-risk cancers and frequent false positives due to observer differences.