Feedback Attention to Enhance Unsupervised Deep Learning Image Registration in 3D Echocardiography

Cardiac motion estimation is important for assessing the contractile health of the heart, and performing this in 3D can provide advantages due to the complex 3D geometry and motions of the heart. Deep learning image registration (DLIR) is a robust way to achieve cardiac motion estimation in echocardiography, providing speed and precision benefits, but DLIR in 3D echo remains challenging. Successful unsupervised 2D DLIR strategies are often not effective in 3D, and there have been few 3D echo DLIR implementations. Here, we propose a new spatial feedback attention (FBA) module to enhance unsupervised 3D DLIR and enable it. The module uses the results of initial registration to generate a co-attention map that describes remaining registration errors spatially and feeds this back to the DLIR to minimize such errors and improve self-supervision. We show that FBA improves a range of promising 3D DLIR designs, including networks with and without transformer enhancements, and that it can be applied to both fetal and adult 3D echo, suggesting that it can be widely and flexibly applied. We further find that the optimal 3D DLIR configuration is when FBA is combined with a spatial transformer and a DLIR backbone modified with spatial and channel attention, which outperforms existing 3D DLIR approaches. FBA’s good performance suggests that spatial attention is a good way to enable scaling up from 2D DLIR to 3D and that a focus on the quality of the image after registration warping is a good way to enhance DLIR performance. Codes and data are available at: https://github.com/kamruleee51/Feedback_DLIR.