  This paper introduces Quicksilver, a fast deformable image registration
method. Quicksilver registration for image-pairs works by patch-wise prediction
of a deformation model based directly on image appearance. A deep
encoder-decoder network is used as the prediction model. While the prediction
strategy is general, we focus on predictions for the Large Deformation
Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) model. Specifically, we predict the
momentum-parameterization of LDDMM, which facilitates a patch-wise prediction
strategy while maintaining the theoretical properties of LDDMM, such as
guaranteed diffeomorphic mappings for sufficiently strong regularization. We
also provide a probabilistic version of our prediction network which can be
sampled during the testing time to calculate uncertainties in the predicted
deformations. Finally, we introduce a new correction network which greatly
increases the prediction accuracy of an already existing prediction network. We
show experimental results for uni-modal atlas-to-image as well as uni- / multi-
modal image-to-image registrations. These experiments demonstrate that our
method accurately predicts registrations obtained by numerical optimization, is
very fast, achieves state-of-the-art registration results on four standard
validation datasets, and can jointly learn an image similarity measure.
Quicksilver is freely available as an open-source software.
