  Surface-based cortical registration is an important topic in medical image
analysis and facilitates many downstream applications. Current approaches for
cortical registration are mainly driven by geometric features, such as sulcal
depth and curvature, and often assume that registration of folding patterns
leads to alignment of brain function. However, functional variability of
anatomically corresponding areas across subjects has been widely reported,
particularly in higher-order cognitive areas. In this work, we present JOSA, a
novel cortical registration framework that jointly models the mismatch between
geometry and function while simultaneously learning an unbiased
population-specific atlas. Using a semi-supervised training strategy, JOSA
achieves superior registration performance in both geometry and function to the
state-of-the-art methods but without requiring functional data at inference.
This learning framework can be extended to any auxiliary data to guide
spherical registration that is available during training but is difficult or
impossible to obtain during inference, such as parcellations, architectonic
identity, transcriptomic information, and molecular profiles. By recognizing
the mismatch between geometry and function, JOSA provides new insights into the
future development of registration methods using joint analysis of the brain
structure and function.
