# An Accessible Solution for Deformable Image Registration Compared with Learning-Based Approaches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02248/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2026.

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

- [VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05231/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Probabilistic Diffeomorphic Registration for Images and Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03545/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Estimation of Large Motion in Lung CT by Integrating Regularized Keypoint Correspondences into Dense Deformable Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00467/) (2018)
- [Voxelmorph++ Going beyond the cranial vault with keypoint supervision and multi-channel instance optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00046/) (2022)
- [SITReg: Multi-resolution architecture for symmetric, inverse consistent, and topology preserving image registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10211/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deformable image registration (DIR) is a core problem in medical image analysis; but, unlike labeling decision problems such as classification and segmentation, registration is a problem class that involves stringent physical constraints. Although deep learning methods have made faster registration possible, the resulting models are often difficult to interpret compared to hand-crafted methods with explicit objectives and interpretable physical meaning. In this work, we show that an analytical method can still yield competitive and superior results to deep learning in a common deformable registration task. We study pTVreg as a parametric total variation based registration in that context. Observing its different implementations to perform at various degrees, we introduce here an accessible implementation of this method, together with a Bayesian optimization framework that automatically sets self-parameters for any DIR task from a set of sample examples. Experiments on Lung250M-4B show that our proposed implementation achieves state-of-the-art results in this benchmark, substantially superior to existing deep learning solutions and other pTVreg variants as baselines. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/oazeybekoglu/ptvreg-python .