“…Pre-processing is needed in many MR-US registration studies. Some methods require skull stripping (Farnia, Ahmadian, Shabanian, Serej, & Alirezaie, 2014) (Farnia, Makkiabadi, Ahmadian, & Alirezaie, 2016) or tissue segmentation (Hong & Park, 2018) (Morin et al, 2017) (Palombi et al, 2018) (Reinertsen, Lindseth, Askeland, Iversen, & Unsgård, 2014) of MR images, or segmentation and removal of bright strips in skin surfaces (Wein, 2018) (Shams, Boucher, & Kadoury, 2018). These pre-processing steps are non-trivial, error-prone, and often require case-specific human intervention in tumorbearing MR images (Drobny et al, 2018) (Farnia et al, 2014) (Farnia et al, 2016).…”