  We propose a novel weakly supervised discriminative algorithm for learning
context specific registration metrics as a linear combination of conventional
similarity measures. Conventional metrics have been extensively used over the
past two decades and therefore both their strengths and limitations are known.
The challenge is to find the optimal relative weighting (or parameters) of
different metrics forming the similarity measure of the registration algorithm.
Hand-tuning these parameters would result in sub optimal solutions and quickly
become infeasible as the number of metrics increases. Furthermore, such
hand-crafted combination can only happen at global scale (entire volume) and
therefore will not be able to account for the different tissue properties. We
propose a learning algorithm for estimating these parameters locally,
conditioned to the data semantic classes. The objective function of our
formulation is a special case of non-convex function, difference of convex
function, which we optimize using the concave convex procedure. As a proof of
concept, we show the impact of our approach on three challenging datasets for
different anatomical structures and modalities.
