Medical Image Registration

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Overview

Medical image registration finds transformations that bring corresponding anatomy into alignment, enabling comparisons across time, modalities, or patients and supporting tasks such as motion correction and surgical guidance. Methods range from intensity- and feature-based optimization to deep networks, implicit deformation models, pretrained image features, and geometric or biomechanical priors; transformations may be rigid, affine, or deformable and diffeomorphic. Researchers evaluate these methods on settings such as brain MRI, lung CT, cardiac imaging, and intraoperative 2D–3D alignment, using landmarks, anatomical overlap, image similarity, and deformation quality. A central challenge is balancing accurate local matches with physically plausible, reliable deformations that generalize across scanners and modalities, since metrics can disagree and better overlap does not always mean better anatomical correspondence.

Latest papers

CardsList

96 papers17 papers in the last four weeks, up 55% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Diffeomorphic Cortical Alignment via Direct Warping of Streamline Endpoints

    May 16, 2026Yang Xiang, Martin Cole, Zhengwu ZhangMedical Image RegistrationNeuroimaging

    Department of Statistics and Operations Research, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester

  2. VoxCor: Training-Free Volumetric Features for Multimodal Voxel Correspondence

    May 13, 2026Guney Tombak, Ertunc Erdil, Ender KonukogluMedical Imaging Foundation ModelsCross-Modal Representation Learning

    Biomedical Image Computing Group, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · The LOOP Zurich – Medical Research Center, Zurich, Switzerland

  3. Set-Based Groupwise Registration for Variable-Length, Variable-Contrast Cardiac MRI

    May 11, 2026Yi Zhang, Yidong Zhao, Tijmen Toxopeus +3Medical Image RegistrationMagnetic Resonance Imaging

    Department of Imaging Physics, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

  4. MSR:Hybrid Field Modeling for CT-MRI Rigid-Deformable Registration of the Cervical Spine with an Annotated Dataset

    Apr 30, 2026Bohai Zhang, Wenjie Chen, Mu Li +8Medical ImagingMedical Image Registration

    School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, 510515, China. · Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing, Guangzhou, 510515, China. · Guangdong Province Engineering Laboratory for Medical Imaging and Diagnostic Technology Guangzhou, 510515, China. +2

  5. Point Cloud Registration for Fusion between SPECT MPI and CTA Images

    Apr 27, 2026Ni Yao, Xiangyu Liu, Shaojie Tang +9Medical ImagingMedical Image Registration

    School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou 450001, Henan, China · School of Automation, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710121, China · Xi'an Key Laboratory of Advanced Control and Intelligent Process, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710121, China +5

  6. CT-Guided Spatially-varying Regularization for Voxel-Wise Deformable Whole-Body PET Registration

    Apr 24, 2026Xiangcen Wu, Ruohua Chen, Sichun Li +4Medical Image RegistrationPET/CT Imaging

    Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing, China · Ren Ji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

  7. Deep learning based Non-Rigid Volume-to-Surface Registration for Brain Shift compensation Using Point Cloud

    Apr 19, 2026Eashrat Jahan Muniya, Gernot Kronreif, Ander Biguri +2Medical Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    Austrian Center for Medical Innovation and Technology, Wiener Neustadt, Austria · Medical University of Vienna, Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering Vienna, Austria · University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) Cambridge, United Kingdom +1

  8. A Multimodal Clinically Informed Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Longitudinal CT Registration in Proton Therapy

    Apr 15, 2026Caiwen Jiang, Yuzhen Ding, Mi Jia +14Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Mayo Clinic, Phoenix, Arizona, USA · School of Biomedical Engineering, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China · Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd., Shanghai 200230, China +2

  9. Warm-Started Reinforcement Learning for Iterative 3D/2D Liver Registration

    Apr 11, 2026Hanyuan Zhang, Lucas He, Zijie Cheng +5Medical Image RegistrationCross-Modal Image Registration

    UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London, UK · Medtronic plc., London, UK

  10. Particle Diffusion Matching: Random Walk Correspondence Search for the Alignment of Standard and Ultra-Widefield Fundus Images

    Apr 11, 2026Kanggeon Lee, Soochahn Lee, Kyoung Mu LeeMedical Image RegistrationCross-Modal Image Registration

    ASRI, Dept. of ECE, Seoul National University, Korea · School of Electrical Engineering, Kookmin University, Korea

  11. Active Diffusion Matching: Score-based Iterative Alignment of Cross-Modal Retinal Images

    Apr 11, 2026Kanggeon Lee, Su Jeong Song, Soochahn Lee +1Medical Image RegistrationCross-Modal Image Registration

    ASRI, Dept. of ECE, Seoul National University, Korea · Dept. of Ophthalmology, Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea · School of Electrical Engineering, Kookmin University, Korea

  12. Search-MIND: Training-Free Multi-Modal Medical Image Registration

    Apr 10, 2026Boya Wang, Ruizhe Li, Chao Chen +1Medical Image RegistrationCross-Modal Image Registration

    Intelligent Modelling & Analysis Group (IMA), School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK · Lab for Uncertainty in Data and Decision Making (LUCID), Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, UK

  13. Rotation Equivariant Convolutions in Deformable Registration of Brain MRI

    Apr 9, 2026Arghavan Rezvani, Kun Han, Anthony T. Wu +2Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    University of California, Irvine

  14. AdamFlow: Adam-based Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Surface Registration in Medical Imaging

    Apr 2, 2026Qiang Ma, Qingjie Meng, Xin Hu +2Medical Image RegistrationWasserstein Gradient Flows

    Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK · Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK · School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK +2

  15. All-in-One Augmented Reality Guided Head and Neck Tumor Resection

    Mar 31, 2026Yue Yang, Matthieu Chabanas, Carrie Reale +5AR in SurgeryMedical Image Localization

    Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering, Nashville, TN 37235, USA · Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN 37232, USA

  16. CoRe: Joint Optimization with Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Registration

    Mar 24, 2026Eytan Kats, Christoph Grossbroehmer, Ziad Al-Haj Hemidi +3Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Insitute of Medical Informatics, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Germany

  17. Cycle Inverse-Consistent TransMorph: A Balanced Deep Learning Framework for Brain MRI Registration

    Mar 23, 2026Jiaqi Shang, Haojin Wu, Yinyi Lai +3Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

  18. Factored Levenberg-Marquardt for Diffeomorphic Image Registration: An efficient optimizer for FireANTs

    Mar 19, 2026Rohit Jena, Pratik Chaudhari, James C. GeeMedical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA · Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA · Department of Radiology & Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory (PICSL), Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

  19. Structured SIR: Efficient and Expressive Importance-Weighted Inference for High-Dimensional Image Registration

    Mar 18, 2026Ivor J. A. Simpson, Neill D. F. CampbellUncertainty QuantificationImportance Sampling

    Department of Informatics University of Sussex, UK · Department of Computer Science University College London, UK · Department of Computer Science University of Bath, UK

  20. Volumetrically Consistent Implicit Atlas Learning via Neural Diffeomorphic Flow for Placenta MRI

    Mar 17, 2026Athena Taymourtash, S. Mazdak Abulnaga, Esra Abaci Turk +2Medical Image AnalysisMedical Image Registration

    MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School · Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

  21. On the Degrees of Freedom of Gridded Control Points in Learning-Based Medical Image Registration

    Mar 15, 2026Wen Yan, Qianye Yang, Yipei Wang +5Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    UCL Hawkes Institute; Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT, London, U.K. · Centre for Medical Imaging, Division of Medicine, University College London, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT, London, U.K. · Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London, 10 Pond St, London NW3 2PS, U.K. +2

  22. Effective Feature Learning for 3D Medical Registration via Domain-Specialized DINO Pretraining

    Mar 14, 2026Eytan Kats, Mattias P. HeinrichMedical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Lübeck, Germany

  23. Match4Annotate: Cross-Video Annotation Transfer in Ultrasound via Implicit Feature Flow-Guided Matching

    Mar 6, 2026Zhuorui Zhang, Roger Pallarès-López, Praneeth Namburi +1Image MatchingMedical Image Registration

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA · Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA · MIT.nano Immersion Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

  24. Preoperative-to-intraoperative Liver Registration for Laparoscopic Surgery via Latent-Grounded Correspondence Constraints

    Mar 2, 2026Ruize Cui, Jialun Pei, Haiqiao Wang +42D-3D Image RegistrationLaparoscopic Surgery

    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

  25. Flow Matching-enabled Test-Time Refinement for Unsupervised Cardiac MR Registration

    Mar 1, 2026Yunguan Fu, Wenjia Bai, Wen Yan +3Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    University College London · InstaDeep · Imperial College London

  26. GLIDE-Reg: Global-to-Local Deformable Registration Using Co-Optimized Foundation and Handcrafted Features

    Feb 27, 2026Yunzheng Zhu, Aichi Chien, Kimaya kulkarni +5Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Medical & Imaging Informatics, Department of Radiological Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, USA · Magnetic Resonance Research Labs, Department of Radiological Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, USA · Department of Radiation Oncology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, USA

  27. Depth Augmented and FE Free 3D/2D Liver Registration for Laparoscopic Liver AR

    Feb 19, 2026Hanyuan Zhang, Lucas He, Runlong He +62D-3D Image RegistrationAR in Surgery

    UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK · Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL, University College London, London WC1E 7HB, UK · Medtronic plc., London, UK +1

  28. Polaffini: A feature-based approach for robust affine and polyaffine image registration

    Feb 19, 2026Antoine Legouhy, Cosimo Campo, Ross Callaghan +2Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Hawkes Institute & Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK · Institut Pasteur, Universit´e Paris Cit´e, Unit´e de Neuroanatomie Appliqu´ee et Th´eorique, France · AINOSTICS ltd., Manchester, UK

  29. NeuralBoneReg: An Instance-Specific Label-Free Point Cloud-Based Method for Multi-Modal Bone Surface Registration

    Nov 18, 2025Luohong Wu, Matthias Seibold, Nicola A. Cavalcanti +5Medical Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    Research in Orthopedic Computer Science, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zurich, Lengghalde 5, Zurich, 8008, Zurich, Switzerland · AI Center, ETH Zurich, Ramistrasse 101, Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

  30. The Impact of Longitudinal Mammogram Alignment on Breast Cancer Risk Assessment

    Nov 11, 2025Solveig Thrun, Stine Hansen, Zijun Sun +8Longitudinal Medical Image AnalysisMammography

    Department of Physics and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, 9037, Norway · SPKI The Norwegian Centre for Clinical Artificial Intelligence, University Hospital of North Norway, Tromsø, 9019, Norway · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, 40126, Bologna, Italy +4