# Driving Points Prediction For Abdominal Probabilistic Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03232/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Image Registration with Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16148/) (2020)
- [Learn2Reg: comprehensive multi-task medical image registration challenge, dataset and evaluation in the era of deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04489/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Object Landmarks as Structural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04412/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised learning of object landmarks by factorized spatial embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02193/) (2017)
- [Closing the Gap between Deep and Conventional Image Registration using Probabilistic Dense Displacement Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10931/) (2019)
- [Estimation of Large Motion in Lung CT by Integrating Regularized Keypoint Correspondences into Dense Deformable Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00467/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Learning to Match 2D Keypoints Across Preoperative MR and Intraoperative Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08169/) (2024)
- [A 3D Cross-modal Keypoint Descriptor for MR-US Matching and Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18551/) (2025)
- [Deep Biomechanically-Guided Interpolation for Keypoint-Based Brain Shift Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13762/) (2025)
- [Data-driven registration and modeling of brain deformation for image-guided neurosurgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10155/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inter-patient abdominal registration has various applications, from pharmakinematic studies to anatomy modeling. Yet, it remains a challenging application due to the morphological heterogeneity and variability of the human abdomen. Among the various registration methods proposed for this task, probabilistic displacement registration models estimate displacement distribution for a subset of points by comparing feature vectors of points from the two images. These probabilistic models are informative and robust while allowing large displacements by design. As the displacement distributions are typically estimated on a subset of points (which we refer to as driving points), due to computational requirements, we propose in this work to learn a driving points predictor. Compared to previously proposed methods, the driving points predictor is optimized in an end-to-end fashion to infer driving points tailored for a specific registration pipeline. We evaluate the impact of our contribution on two different datasets corresponding to different modalities. Specifically, we compared the performances of 6 different probabilistic displacement registration models when using a driving points predictor or one of 2 other standard driving points selection methods. The proposed method improved performances in 11 out of 12 experiments.