Benchmarking Intra-Patient 3D Deformable Multimodal Image Registration
Matteo Barbieri, Giammarco La Barbera, Juan Pablo De La Plata, Sabine Sarnacki, Isabelle Bloch, Pietro Gori
Abstract
Multimodal image registration is a key component of many clinical workflows, yet it remains challenging because corresponding anatomical structures often exhibit substantially different image intensities across modalities. In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark of intra-patient 3D multimodal deformable registration methods across three datasets covering different anatomical regions and difficulty levels, including both synthetic deformation recovery and real clinical scenarios. We evaluate classical optimization-based approaches and modern learning-based methods, including recent deep learning and foundation models, using complementary metrics: Average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), average 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95), and a modality-independent structural similarity measure based on the MIND self-similarity context (MIND-SSC). Results show high variability across datasets, with learning-based methods demonstrating superior performance on large synthetic benchmarks, while only limited improvements are observed in real pelvic registration. A key finding of this study is the consistent disagreement between geometric metrics (DSC, HD95) and image-based similarity metrics (MIND-SSC), highlighting that improved overlap does not necessarily imply better global multimodal correspondence. Furthermore, anatomy-guided approaches achieve the highest overlap scores but exhibit degraded performance outside of segmented regions, revealing a trade-off between label-driven alignment and global structural coherence. Overall, our results indicate that no current method achieves robust performance across anatomies and modalities. We demonstrate that intra-patient 3D multimodal registration requires multi-criteria evaluation, including deformation-based metrics, and remains an open problem.