Decoder-Only Image Registration

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2025 Aug;44(8):3356-3369. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2025.3562056.

Abstract

In unsupervised medical image registration, encoder-decoder architectures are widely used to predict dense, full-resolution displacement fields from paired images. Despite their popularity, we question the necessity of making both the encoder and decoder learnable. To address this, we propose LessNet, a simplified network architecture with only a learnable decoder, while completely omitting a learnable encoder. Instead, LessNet replaces the encoder with simple, handcrafted features, eliminating the need to optimize encoder parameters. This results in a compact, efficient, and decoder-only architecture for 3D medical image registration. We evaluate our decoder-only LessNet on five registration tasks: 1) inter-subject brain registration using the OASIS-1 dataset, 2) atlas-based brain registration using the IXI dataset, 3) cardiac ES-ED registration using the ACDC dataset, 4) inter-subject abdominal MR registration using the CHAOS dataset, and 5) multi-study, multi-site brain registration using images from 13 public datasets. Our results demonstrate that LessNet can effectively and efficiently learn both dense displacement and diffeomorphic deformation fields. Furthermore, our decoder-only LessNet can achieve comparable registration performance to benchmarking methods such as VoxelMorph and TransMorph, while requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/xi-jia/LessNet.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Brain / diagnostic imaging
  • Databases, Factual
  • Heart / diagnostic imaging
  • Humans
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional* / methods
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods