Background and purpose: Deformable image registration (DIR) is a crucial tool in radiotherapy for extracting and modelling organ motion. However, when significant changes and sliding boundaries are present, it faces compromised accuracy and uncertainty, determining the subsequential contour propagation and dose accumulation procedures. Materials and methods: We propose an implicit neural representation (INR)-based approach modelling motion continuously in both space and time, named Continues-sPatial-Temporal DIR (CPT-DIR). This method uses a multilayer perception (MLP) network to map 3D coordinate (x,y,z) to its corresponding velocity vector (vx,vy,vz). The displacement vectors (dx,dy,dz) are then calculated by integrating velocity vectors over time. The MLP's parameters can rapidly adapt to new cases without pre-training, enhancing optimisation. The DIR's performance was tested on the DIR-Lab dataset of 10 lung 4DCT cases, using metrics of landmark accuracy (TRE), contour conformity (Dice) and image similarity (MAE). Results: The proposed CPT-DIR can reduce landmark TRE from 2.79mm to 0.99mm, outperforming B-splines' results for all cases. The MAE of the whole-body region improves from 35.46HU to 28.99HU. Furthermore, CPT-DIR surpasses B-splines for accuracy in the sliding boundary region, lowering MAE and increasing Dice coefficients for the ribcage from 65.65HU and 90.41% to 42.04HU and 90.56%, versus 75.40HU and 89.30% without registration. Meanwhile, CPT-DIR offers significant speed advantages, completing in under 15 seconds compared to a few minutes with the conventional B-splines method. Conclusion: Leveraging the continuous representations, the CPT-DIR method significantly enhances registration accuracy, automation and speed, outperforming traditional B-splines in landmark and contour precision, particularly in the challenging areas.
Intra-fraction motion in radiotherapy is commonly modeled using deformable image registration (DIR). However, existing methods often struggle to balance speed and accuracy, limiting their applicability in clinical scenarios. This study introduces a novel approach that harnesses Neural Graphics Primitives (NGP) to optimize the displacement vector field (DVF). Our method leverages learned primitives, processed as splats, and interpolates within space using a shallow neural network. Uniquely, it enables self-supervised optimization at an ultra-fast speed, negating the need for pre-training on extensive datasets and allowing seamless adaptation to new cases. We validated this approach on the 4D-CT lung dataset DIR-lab, achieving a target registration error (TRE) of 1.15\pm1.15 mm within a remarkable time of 1.77 seconds. Notably, our method also addresses the sliding boundary problem, a common challenge in conventional DIR methods.
Error backpropagation is an extremely effective algorithm for assigning credit in artificial neural networks. However, weight updates under Backprop depend on lengthy recursive computations and require separate output and error messages -- features not shared by biological neurons, that are perhaps unnecessary. In this paper, we revisit Backprop and the credit assignment problem. We first decompose Backprop into a collection of interacting learning algorithms; provide regret bounds on the performance of these sub-algorithms; and factorize Backprop's error signals. Using these results, we derive a new credit assignment algorithm for nonparametric regression, Kickback, that is significantly simpler than Backprop. Finally, we provide a sufficient condition for Kickback to follow error gradients, and show that Kickback matches Backprop's performance on real-world regression benchmarks.
This paper proposes a new paradigm and computational framework for identification of correspondences between sub-structures of distinct composite systems. For this, we define and investigate a variant of traditional data clustering, termed coupled clustering, which simultaneously identifies corresponding clusters within two data sets. The presented method is demonstrated and evaluated for detecting topical correspondences in textual corpora.