Identity-mapping cascaded network for fMRI registration

Neuroscience researches based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) rely on accurate inter-subject image registration of functional regions. The intersubject alignment of fMRI can improve the statistical power of group analyses. Recent studies have shown the deep learning-based registration methods can be used for registration. In our work, we proposed a 30-Identity-Mapping Cascaded network (30-IMCNet) for rs-fMRI registration. It is a cascaded network that can warp the moving image progressively and finally align to the fixed image. A Combination unit with an identity-mapping path is added to the inputs of each IMCNet to guide the network training. We implemented 30-IMCNet on an rs-fMRI dataset (1000 Functional Connectomes Project dataset) and a task-related fMRI dataset (Eyes Open Eyes Closed fMRI dataset). To evaluate our method, a group-level analysis was implemented in the testing dataset. For rs-fMRI, the criterions such as peak t-value of group-level t-maps, cluster-level evaluation, and intersubject functional network correlation were used to evaluate the quality of the registrations. For task-related fMRI, peak t-value in ALFF paired-t map and peak t-value in ReHo paired-t maps were used. Compared with traditional algorithm FSL, SPM, and deep learning algorithm Kim et al, Zhao et al our method has improvements of 48.90%, 30.73%, 36.38%, and 16.73% in the peak t value of t-maps. Our proposed method can achieve superior functional registration performance and thus gain a significant improvement in functional consistency.