College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, Guangdong, China.
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, Guangdong, China.
Comput Biol Med. 2024 Aug;178:108785. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.108785. Epub 2024 Jun 25.
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are an efficient variational inference technique coupled with the generated network. Due to the uncertainty provided by variational inference, VAEs have been applied in medical image registration. However, a critical problem in VAEs is that the simple prior cannot provide suitable regularization, which leads to the mismatch between the variational posterior and prior. An optimal prior can close the gap between the evidence's real and variational posterior. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage VAE to learn the optimal prior, which is the aggregated posterior. A lightweight VAE is used to generate the aggregated posterior as a whole. It is an effective way to estimate the distribution of the high-dimensional aggregated posterior that commonly exists in medical image registration based on VAEs. A factorized telescoping classifier is trained to estimate the density ratio of a simple given prior and aggregated posterior, aiming to calculate the KL divergence between the variational and aggregated posterior more accurately. We analyze the KL divergence and find that the finer the factorization, the smaller the KL divergence is. However, too fine a partition is not conducive to registration accuracy. Moreover, the diagonal hypothesis of the variational posterior's covariance ignores the relationship between latent variables in image registration. To address this issue, we learn a covariance matrix with low-rank information to enable correlations with each dimension of the variational posterior. The covariance matrix is further used as a measure to reduce the uncertainty of deformation fields. Experimental results on four public medical image datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other methods in negative log-likelihood (NLL) and achieves better registration accuracy.
变分自编码器 (VAEs) 是一种高效的变分推理技术,与生成网络相结合。由于变分推理提供的不确定性,VAEs 已被应用于医学图像配准。然而,VAEs 的一个关键问题是简单的先验不能提供合适的正则化,这导致变分后验与先验不匹配。最优的先验可以缩小证据的真实后验和变分后验之间的差距。在本文中,我们提出了一种多阶段 VAE 来学习最优先验,即聚合后验。一个轻量级的 VAE 被用来生成聚合后验作为一个整体。这是一种有效估计基于 VAEs 的医学图像配准中常见的高维聚合后验分布的方法。一个因子化的伸缩分类器被训练来估计简单给定的先验和聚合后验之间的密度比,旨在更准确地计算变分后验和聚合后验之间的 KL 散度。我们分析了 KL 散度,发现分割越细,KL 散度越小。然而,太细的划分不利于配准精度。此外,变分后验协方差的对角假设忽略了图像配准中潜在变量之间的关系。为了解决这个问题,我们学习了一个具有低秩信息的协方差矩阵,以便与变分后验的每个维度相关联。协方差矩阵进一步被用作减少变形场不确定性的度量。在四个公共医学图像数据集上的实验结果表明,我们提出的方法在负对数似然 (NLL) 方面优于其他方法,并实现了更好的配准精度。