VI seminar #47:
Elisabeth Wetzer, serving as a bioinformatician at the Karolinska Institute's Department of Oncology-Pathology in Sweden and an incoming associate professor at the UiT Machine Learning Group, presented her work titled "Representation Learning for Multimodal Image Registration" at the VI seminar series (9 November, 2023).
Abstract: Combining the information of different imaging modalities offers complimentary information about the properties of the imaged specimen. Often these modalities need to be captured by different machines, which requires that the resulting images need to be matched and registered in order to map the corresponding signals to each other. This can be a very challenging task due to the varying appearance of the specimen in different sensors. We can exploit representation learning techniques to find image-like representations of both modalities, that are similar in intensity and features, which allows us to transform the very challenging multimodal registration task into a generally easier, monomodal one. These representations are required to have certain properties important to the downstream task of registration, e.g. being rotationally equivariant, which can be achieved by different approaches. In this talk, I will discuss two approaches to generate these representations, which form an alternative to GAN or diffusion-model based image-to-image translation as they require a lot less training data - an important aspect in biomedical applications.