Meta-Initialization of Implicit Neural Representations to Accelerate Deformable Medical Image Registration

Abstract

Implicit neural representation (INR) methods for deformable medical image registration require the network parameters to be optimized for each new image pair, making adaptation speed a practical limitation. This work investigates whether early adaptation can be accelerated using an initialization learned from a collection of previously solved registration tasks. We examine two schemes: Reptile meta-initialization and STRAINER transfer of the shared component of a coordinate network. KAN-IDIR is used as the base INR displacement-field model. Experiments are conducted on OASIS-1, with 364 consecutive pairs used for training and 49 pairs for test-time adaptation. Registration quality is evaluated using mean Dice and HD95, together with the fraction of voxels with a negative Jacobian determinant at iteration 1500. In the configurations studied, both schemes yield higher Dice and lower HD95 at early iterations than random initialization. Reptile numerically outperforms STRAINER under a small iteration budget, although their pretraining budgets are not matched. As the number of iterations increases, the differences between the schemes shrink. STRAINER pretraining takes 39-40 minutes, compared with 44.98 hours for Reptile.

arXiv comment14 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. English-language author version of a paper presented at GraphiCon 2026, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 22-24 September 2026. Russian-language proceedings forthcoming. Related work updated for this version