  Image registration is a fundamental requirement for medical image analysis.
Deep registration methods based on deep learning have been widely recognized
for their capabilities to perform fast end-to-end registration. Many deep
registration methods achieved state-of-the-art performance by performing
coarse-to-fine registration, where multiple registration steps were iterated
with cascaded networks. Recently, Non-Iterative Coarse-to-finE (NICE)
registration methods have been proposed to perform coarse-to-fine registration
in a single network and showed advantages in both registration accuracy and
runtime. However, existing NICE registration methods mainly focus on deformable
registration, while affine registration, a common prerequisite, is still
reliant on time-consuming traditional optimization-based methods or extra
affine registration networks. In addition, existing NICE registration methods
are limited by the intrinsic locality of convolution operations. Transformers
may address this limitation for their capabilities to capture long-range
dependency, but the benefits of using transformers for NICE registration have
not been explored. In this study, we propose a Non-Iterative Coarse-to-finE
Transformer network (NICE-Trans) for image registration. Our NICE-Trans is the
first deep registration method that (i) performs joint affine and deformable
coarse-to-fine registration within a single network, and (ii) embeds
transformers into a NICE registration framework to model long-range relevance
between images. Extensive experiments with seven public datasets show that our
NICE-Trans outperforms state-of-the-art registration methods on both
registration accuracy and runtime.
