Meta-Initialization of Implicit Neural Representations to Accelerate Deformable Medical Image Registration

meta-initialization-of-implicit-neural-representations-to-accelerate-deformable-medical-image-registration

Meta-Initialization of Implicit Neural Representations to Accelerate Deformable Medical Image Registration

[Submitted on 27 Oct 2026]

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Abstract:Implicit neural representation (INR) methods for deformable medical image registration require the network parameters to be optimized for each new image pair, making adaptation speed a practical limitation. This work investigates whether early adaptation can be accelerated using an initialization learned from a collection of previously solved registration tasks. We examine two schemes: Reptile meta-initialization and STRAINER transfer of the shared component of a coordinate network. KAN-IDIR is used as the base INR displacement-field model. Experiments are conducted on OASIS-1, with 364 consecutive pairs used for training and 49 pairs for test-time adaptation. Registration quality is evaluated using mean Dice and HD95, together with the fraction of voxels with a negative Jacobian determinant at iteration 1500. In the configurations studied, both schemes yield higher Dice and lower HD95 at early iterations than random initialization. Reptile numerically outperforms STRAINER under a small iteration budget, although their pretraining budgets are not matched. As the number of iterations increases, the differences between the schemes shrink. STRAINER pretraining takes 39-40 minutes, compared with 44.98 hours for Reptile.

Submission history

From: Dmitry Sorokin [view email]
[v1] Tue, 27 Oct 2026 20:57:39 UTC (5,880 KB)