Convex Potential Learning for Optimal Transport Between Medical Images

Hongyu Kan, Ivan Medri, Natasha Ironside, Kristofor Pas, Richard Corp +2

Computing optimal transport maps between medical images plays a fundamental role in morphological analysis. However, existing methods are either difficult to scale to large 3D medical images or rely on regularized formulations that provide only approximate transport maps. To improve the accuracy of downstream medical image analysis, we propose a novel approach for estimating optimal transport maps by parameterizing the convex potential function. By construction, the resulting transport map is guaranteed to be curl-free, consistent with Brenier's theorem. We evaluate the proposed method on both 2D and 3D medical imaging datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves lower transport estimation errors and produces higher-quality image reconstructions than existing methods.