SCoPE-Reg: Efficient Rigid Ultrasound Slice-to-Volume Registration via State-Space Correlation and Closed-Form Pose Estimation
Authors: Niklas Schwarz, Jens Kleesiek, Moritz Rempe
Organizations: Institute for AI in Medicine (IKIM), University Hospital Essen, Girardetstraße 2, 45131 Essen, Germany · Cancer Research Center Cologne Essen (CCCE), University Medicine Essen, Hufelandstraße 55, 45147 Essen, Germany · RACOON Study Group, Site Essen, Essen, Germany · Department of Physics, Technical University Dortmund, Otto-Hahn-Straße 4a, 44227 Dortmund, Germany · German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), Partner Site Essen, Hufelandstraße 55, 45147 Essen, Germany · Medical Faculty and Faculty of Computer Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, 45141 Essen, Germany · Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
Ultrasound-guided interventions can require localization of an untracked 2D frame within a 3D anatomical reference. Rigid slice-to-volume registration (SVR) estimates this six-degree-of-freedom pose but remains challenging because of limited anatomical context, acoustic artifacts, and view-dependent appearance. Existing methods often use dense cross-attention, whose cost scales with the product of slice and volume token counts, or direct pose regression without explicit correspondence constraints. We introduce SCoPE-Reg, combining state-space slice--volume interaction, dense 3D coordinate prediction, and parameter-free weighted Kabsch estimation. On SVR tasks from CAMUS and μ-RegPro, SCoPE-Reg yields mean target registration errors of 0.73 mm and 2.27 mm against 1.24 mm and 2.63 mm for the state of the art (SOTA), reduces peak error on CAMUS by 56% below SOTA (12.5→5.5 mm), and registers 100% and 80% of frames within 3 mm. On CAMUS at 1282 it retains the lowest error at increasing pose-perturbation magnitude. It holds 6.49 M parameters independent of resolution, sustaining 51 FPS at 5122. SCoPE-Reg establishes a SOTA in rigid ultrasound SVR: by coupling correspondence-based accuracy with bounded worst-case error and resolution-independent cost, it becomes viable at native acquisition resolution during intervention, where prior methods trade accuracy, reliability, or frame rate against one another. Supplementary code provided and will be open-sourced upon acceptance.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of SCoPE-Reg. 2D/3D encoders extract features, which Correlation-Weighted Coordinate Decoder (CWCD) fuses with grids to predict dense coordinates q and evidence weights w . Weighted Kabsch then estimates rigid pose T^ in closed form.
Figure 2: SSVF and depth reduction. Slice/volume features and coordinate grids are fused across four spatial orderings. DI-SSM feature scans yield Yf and coordinate scans accumulate weighted locations into Z ; depth reduction on ( Yf,Z ) then yields coordinate numerator Y and evidence weights w .
mTRE (mm) ↓
TransErr ↓
RotErr ↓
≤3 mm ↑
Dice ↑
HD95 ↓
NCC ↑
SSIM ↑
Method
mean
p95
max
(mm)
( ∘ )
(%)
(%)
CAMUS
Initial (identity)
8.17±0.05
10.71
13.55
5.93±0.05
9.64±0.11
0.1±0.0
–
–
–
–
FVR-Net [ 19 ]
4.90±0.56
10.89
15.12
3.31±0.55
6.36±0.27
3.0±0.8
0.942±0.011
5.56±0.70
0.731±0.052
0.436±0.021
CU-Reg [ 31 ]
2.46±1.19
6.30
15.15
1.67±0.81
3.88±2.02
69.5±32.8
0.979±0.011
2.62±1.62
0.923±0.051
0.666±0.107
EUReg [ 44 ]
1.24±0.15
2.01
12.47
0.58±0.07
1.64±0.25
97.2±0.6
0.986±0.003
1.63±0.20
0.964±0.006
0.789±0.029
DreamReg [ 28 ]
6.50±0.05
9.10
11.78
4.31±0.02
8.95±0.12
1.1±0.2
0.928±0.003
7.20±0.27
0.669±0.007
0.303±0.005
Table 1: Slice-to-volume registration accuracy. Mean ± std over 5 folds. mTRE, TransErr, HD95 in mm; RotErr in ∘ ; ≤ 3 mm in %. Dice/HD95 show label overlap under unified protocols. Bold / underlined : best/second-best.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison. Outer columns: the volume centre frame at the identity pose (left) and the 2D target frame at ground-truth pose (right). Between: each method’s resampled slice at its predicted pose and its absolute difference to the target (black: agreement, red: error; shared scale). Top: CAMUS [ 30 ] , echocardiography; bottom: μ -RegPro [ 2 ] , transrectal prostate. Median-error test cases.
Figure 4: Robustness to pose perturbations on CAMUS ( 1282 ). Log DistErr (mm) across 6-DoF ranges. Lines and shading denote mean ± std; dashed line shows zero-pose baseline.
Res.
Params (M)
GFLOPs
FPS
Mem (MiB)
FVR-Net [ 19 ]
1282
67.80
61.2
33
378
1922
76.19
137.7
33
546
3842
151.68
550.8
18
1561
5122
243.96
979.2
13
2670
CU-Reg [ 31 ]
1282
98.82
38.7
35
531
1922
98.82
93.2
35
1068
Table 2: Computational efficiency vs. resolution on CAMUS. Single-frame (batch 1) inference. GFLOPs exclude custom selective_scan kernels; FPS and memory are end-to-end.
mTRE (mm) ↓
Mem
Variant
mean
p95
max
(MiB)
FPS
Cross Att. + Direct Heads
1.91±0.30
4.64
13.69
75
281
SSVF + Direct Heads
0.68±0.02
1.57
10.04
82
274
CWCD + Direct Heads
0.72±0.04
1.61
11.61
81
153
CWCD + Kabsch Solver
0.89±0.04
1.95
5.59
79
150
CWCD + WKPS (Ours)
0.73±0.04
1.37
5.49
79
150
Table 3: Ablation on CAMUS ( 1282 ). mTRE in mm reported as 5-fold mean ± std, with p95 and max pooled across test frames. Memory and FPS measured at batch size 1. Best results in bold .
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
LR
LR schedule
Epochs
Method
Optimizer
CAMUS
μ -RegPro
WD
CAMUS
μ -RegPro
Warm-up
Batch
CAMUS
μ -RegPro
FVR-Net [ 19 ]
Adam
10−4
5×10−5
0
step ( ×0.8 /5 ep)
constant
–
16
150
1500
CU-Reg [ 31 ]
Adam
5×10−5
5×10−5
0
one-shot ×0.3‡
constant
–
24
500
1500
EUReg [ 44 ]
Adam
10−4
10−4
0
poly ( p=0.9 )
poly ( p=0.9 )
–
6
1000
30000
DreamReg [ 28 ]
AdamW
10−4
10−5
0.01
plateau ( ×0.5 , pat. 1)
plateau ( ×0.2 , pat. 2)
6 ep
64
100
100
Ours
AdamW
5×10−5
5×10−5
0.01
poly ( p=0.9 )
poly ( p=0.9 )
–
6
500
1500
Appendix
Table S1 : Training hyperparameter configurations across experimental benchmarks. Optimization protocols, learning-rate schedules, weight decay ( WD ), batch sizes, and epoch budgets for each model.
Baseline
Δ (mm)
95% CI
∣z∣
padj
r
Magnitude
CAMUS [ 30 ] ( T=4000 paired frames)
FVR-Net [ 19 ]
+4.17
[+4.09,+4.25]
54.8
<10−4
0.87
Large
CU-Reg [ 31 ]
+1.73
[+1.67,+1.80]
47.2
<10−4
0.75
Large
EUReg [ 44 ]
+0.51
[+0.49,+0.53]
33.8
<10−4
0.53
Large
DreamReg [ 28 ]
+5.77
[+5.73,+5.82]
54.8
<10−4
0.87
Large
μ -RegPro [ 2 ] ( T=584 paired frames)
Appendix
Table S2 : Paired significance and effect size, SCoPE-Reg vs. each baseline (mTRE). Frames are paired by identity. Δ denotes mean frame-level error reduction (positive favors ours) with a bootstrap 95% CI ( 1000 resamples); padj reflects two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank testing with Holm–Bonferroni correction.
Figure S1 : Frame-level mTRE distributions (log scale). Boxes show median and IQR ( 1.5×IQR whiskers); points represent outliers beyond whiskers (max 40 shown, including absolute peak error). Statistics are pooled across all 5-fold test frames.
Figure S2 : Qualitative registration performance across error percentiles on CAMUS (top) and μ -RegPro (bottom). Rows depict Best, Median, p95 , and Worst test cases ranked by SCoPE-Reg frame-level error. Each method presents the resampled slice at predicted pose (left) and absolute intensity difference ∣GT−pred∣ on a normalized red scale (right; black denotes exact structural alignment).
mTRE (mm) ↓
Mem
Variant
mean
p95
max
(MiB)
FPS
CWCD + WKPS (Ours)
0.73±0.04
1.37
5.49
79
150
Tri-plane CWCD + WKPS
0.87±0.03
1.83
8.13
98
110
CWCD + WKPS + Lphy
0.82±0.06
1.64
7.31
79
150
CWCD + WKPS + Lflow
0.79±0.05
1.52
6.75
79
150
CWCD + WKPS + Lphy + Lflow
0.76±0.05
1.45
6.18
79
150
Appendix
Table S3 : Ablation of flow regularization ( Lflow ), physics loss, and advanced scan mechanism on CAMUS ( 1282 ). mTRE in mm (mean ± std over 5 folds; p95 and max pooled). Memory and FPS measured at batch size 1. Best results in bold .
Medical image registration aligns scans across time, patients, or imaging modalities to track anatomy and support diagnosis, treatment, and image-guided procedures.
Ultrasound (US) is widely used for surgical navigation, yet real-time registration between intraoperative 2D slices and preoperative 3D volumes remains challenging due to partial observability, speckle noise, and the action-dependent US acquisition. Existing methods are one-shot or short-horizon, making it hard for them to gather evidence over time or capture how surgeons adjust probe motion based on on-screen feedback. We propose DreamReg, a belief-driven world-model framework that formulates 2D-3D registration as belief updating over rigid transformations. DreamReg maintains a latent belief state that summarizes past observations and poses information, and continuously refines the transformation through learned dynamics as new slices arrive. During training, DreamReg is exposed to probe-motion trajectories that mimic clinical scanning behavior and learns to update its belief by conditioning pose refinement on the current US observation. During inference, DreamReg refines registration via internal imagination: it rolls out the learned world model to simulate candidate probe motions and their predicted observations, and integrates these imagined outcomes to converge to an accurate rigid transformation. Experiments on CAMUS and u-RegPro datasets demonstrate improved robustness and competitive registration accuracy for real-time guidance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Luoyao Kang, Yuelin Zhang, Jiwei Shan +3
Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering and T Stone Robotics Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA · Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering and Multi-scale Medical Robotics Center, Hong Kong SAR, China
Slice-to-volume registration between ultrasound (US) and preoperative computed tomography (CT) imaging would enhance many minimally invasive interventions, for example by locating soft tissue structures intra-operatively that are discernible in CT. While optical tracking enables initial rigid registration, contact from the probe induces soft tissue deformations that inhibit accurate alignment. In this work, we introduce a deformable CT-ultrasound registration framework that incorporates anatomical priors derived from CT to improve registration under deformation. Rigid registration is first established using a robot-assisted optical tracking system, after which a deformable transformation is estimated using a sinusoidal implicit neural representation (SIREN) optimized per frame. Tissue stiffness is approximated from CT-based HU values and used as spatially varying regularization, suppressing deformation in rigid structures such as bone while allowing more flexibility in soft tissue. Two additional constraints capture the physics of probe contact: a contact-zone displacement prior that drives the displacement field to compress tissue below the probe face, and a fan-geometry regularization term based on beam direction and convex transducer field of view. Model parameters are optimized with a normalized gradient field (NGF). The proposed approach improves alignment over rigid initialisation by 17% and outperforms classical deformable baselines while maintaining near-zero topological folding.
Agnieszka Lach, Magdalena Wysocki, Feng Li +7
medPhoton GmbH, Salzburg, Austria · Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
3D/2D registration serves as a cornerstone technique in surgical navigation. Traditional iterative optimization algorithms suffer from low efficiency and high failure rates in intraoperative settings. Deep learning-based methods reformulate registration from iterative optimization to a regression problem that maps image appearance features to spatial pose, typically achieving improved real-time performance and accuracy. However, such learnable methods are confined to memory-driven retrieval of specific pose features rather than understanding the task of image alignment itself, which limits their generalization in complex scenarios. We propose LayersReg, a pioneering regression paradigm that endows the model with 3D anatomical awareness and searches for the correct pose in a progressive, layer-by-layer manner. Inspired by the iterative pose-searching optimization criterion of classical registration, LayersReg searches for correlations between the moving and fixed images in feature space, capturing the trend of pixel flow and thereby converging iteratively toward the correct spatial pose transformation. We further design a coupling of node-wise regression with the progressive registration framework to enhance the model's perception of spatial pose changes. Experimental results demonstrate that under large offsets and multimodality conditions, LayersReg achieves high accuracy on both X-ray/CT registration (0.68°, 1.41 mm) and slice localization (0.73°, 1.55 mm) tasks, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods while meeting the intraoperative demands for precision and real-time capability.
Xiyuan Wang, Zhenchao Wang, Xinran Chen +3
School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering Southeast University Nanjing · School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Physical Sciences University of Birmingham Birmingham · State Key Laboratory of Digital Medical Engineering Southeast University Nanjing