  Image registration, the process of aligning two or more images, is the core
technique of many (semi-)automatic medical image analysis tasks. Recent studies
have shown that deep learning methods, notably convolutional neural networks
(ConvNets), can be used for image registration. Thus far training of ConvNets
for registration was supervised using predefined example registrations.
However, obtaining example registrations is not trivial. To circumvent the need
for predefined examples, and thereby to increase convenience of training
ConvNets for image registration, we propose the Deep Learning Image
Registration (DLIR) framework for \textit{unsupervised} affine and deformable
image registration. In the DLIR framework ConvNets are trained for image
registration by exploiting image similarity analogous to conventional
intensity-based image registration. After a ConvNet has been trained with the
DLIR framework, it can be used to register pairs of unseen images in one shot.
We propose flexible ConvNets designs for affine image registration and for
deformable image registration. By stacking multiple of these ConvNets into a
larger architecture, we are able to perform coarse-to-fine image registration.
We show for registration of cardiac cine MRI and registration of chest CT that
performance of the DLIR framework is comparable to conventional image
registration while being several orders of magnitude faster.
