  We propose an unsupervised deep learning method for atlas based registration
to achieve segmentation and spatial alignment of the embryonic brain in a
single framework. Our approach consists of two sequential networks with a
specifically designed loss function to address the challenges in 3D first
trimester ultrasound. The first part learns the affine transformation and the
second part learns the voxelwise nonrigid deformation between the target image
and the atlas. We trained this network end-to-end and validated it against a
ground truth on synthetic datasets designed to resemble the challenges present
in 3D first trimester ultrasound. The method was tested on a dataset of human
embryonic ultrasound volumes acquired at 9 weeks gestational age, which showed
alignment of the brain in some cases and gave insight in open challenges for
the proposed method. We conclude that our method is a promising approach
towards fully automated spatial alignment and segmentation of embryonic brains
in 3D ultrasound.
