CCMNet: Cross-scale correlation-aware mapping network for 3D lung CT image registration

The lung is characterized by high elasticity and complex structure, which implies that the lung is capable of undergoing complex deformation and the shape variable is substantial. Large deformation estimation poses significant challenges to lung image registration. The traditional U-Net architecture is difficult to cover complex deformation due to its limited receptive field. Moreover, the relationship between voxels weakens as the number of downsampling times increases, that is, the long-range dependence issue. In this paper, we propose a novel multilevel registration framework which enhances the correspondence between voxels to improve the ability of estimating large deformations. Our approach consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a two-stream registration structure and a cross-scale mapping attention (CSMA) mechanism. The former extracts the robust features of image pairs within layers, while the latter establishes frequent connections between layers to maintain the correlation of image pairs. This method fully utilizes the context information of different scales to establish the mapping relationship between low-resolution and high-resolution feature maps. We have achieved remarkable results on DIRLAB (TRE 1.56 ± 1.60) and POPI (NCC 99.72% SSIM 91.42%) dataset, demonstrating that this strategy can effectively address the large deformation issues, mitigate long-range dependence, and ultimately achieve more robust lung CT image registration.