Multi-modality medical image fusion using hybridization of binary crow search optimization.

Multimodality medical image fusion is the process of combining multiple images from single or multiple modalities of imaging. Medical image fusion methods are adopted to increase the quality of medical images by attaining the salient features in the fusion results. Hence, they raise the clinical applicability of medical images for appraisal and diagnosis problems. This purpose is achieved by capturing the complementary information presented in two or more images of different modalities in the fusion result. Medical image fusion is generally concerned with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetic Resonance Angiogram (MRA), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Structural Positron Emission Tomography (SPET), Computerized Tomography (CT), and Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) modalities. Each modality has its merits and drawbacks. This induces new fusion methods for merging information from multiple imaging modalities. Researchers have presented several methods for medical image fusion, and these methods achieved good results. However, medical image fusion is a resurgent field that needs to be enhanced to conquer the increasing challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of some existing medical image fusion methods. It is expected that this study will be useful for the researchers scrutinizing medical image fusion. Furthermore, it is expected to establish a concrete foundation for developing more powerful fusion methods for medical applications.

An image quality enhancement scheme employing adolescent identity search algorithm in the NSST domain for multimodal medical image fusion

Wavelet transforms have emerged as a powerful tool in image fusion. However, the study and analysis of medical image fusion is still a challenging area of research. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multiscale fusion of multimodal medical images in wavelet domain. Fusion of medical images has been performed at multiple scales varying from minimum to maximum level using maximum selection rule which provides more flexibility and choice to select the relevant fused images. The experimental analysis of the proposed method has been performed with several sets of medical images. Fusion results have been evaluated subjectively and objectively with existing state-of-the-art fusion methods which include several pyramid- and wavelet-transform-based fusion methods and principal component analysis (PCA) fusion method. The comparative analysis of the fusion results has been performed with edge strength (Q), mutual information (MI), entropy (E), standard deviation (SD), blind structural similarity index metric (BSSIM), spatial frequency (SF), and average gradient (AG) metrics. The combined subjective and objective evaluations of the proposed fusion method at multiple scales showed the effectiveness and goodness of the proposed approach.

Multimodal medical image fusion based on visual saliency map and multichannel dynamic threshold neural P systems in sub-window variance filter domain

Abstract: Multi-modality medical or clinical image fusion is a field of study aimed at enhancing diagnostic accuracy and aid in decisions to be taken by medical professional. Various fusion techniques such as pixel-based, region-based, and transformbased approaches are applied in image fusion to provide accurate fusion. Different devices which take scans of body such as MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, Ultrasound hold and carry different features, and different medical sensors obtain different information of the particular part of the body. Each of these imaging modalities offer only specific information that is used for the detection and analysis of specific problem. The idea behind fusion is to achieve and get better contrast and better fused image. The algorithm is making use of the common pyramid type and similarity type fusion algorithm with the neural networks model to achieve a better and more flexible fusion method. The advantages of image fusion medically are widespread. It plays a pivotal role in tumour localization, surgical planning and in treatment assessment.

An adaptation of hybrid binary optimization algorithms for medical image feature selection in neural network for classification of breast cancer

Multimodal medical image fusion is to extract information from different modal images into a single one and obtain the organizational characteristics of source images. Different medical imaging measures such as CT and MRI often bring different visual morphology, however, the salient features of tissues are basically the same from the perspective of human eyes. According to this characteristic, an improved image fusion algorithm based on visual salience detection is proposed in this paper. First, the GBVS algorithm was introduced to calculate visual salience of two registered source images, and then decompose the source images in NSST domain to obtain their low-frequency and high-frequency sub-bands. For the low-frequency sub-bands, local energy and GBVS graph are input into fuzzy logic system to obtain the respective weights for the fused low-frequency sub-band. For the high-frequency sub-bands, the NSML values of each sub-band were calculated and compared to obtain the fused high-frequency sub-band. The final fused image was obtained by using the inverse NSST transformation. Applying this method to multimodal medical image fusion, the visual quality of the image can be enhanced effectively and the salient features of tissues can be preserved well. Experiments on multimodal fusion of different gray-scale medical images show that the proposed method has advantages in retention of image salient features and the overall image contrast, and has better objective index than the comparison models.

NUC-Fuse: Multimodal medical image fusion using nuclear norm & classification of brain tumors using ARBFN

Multimodal medical image fusion integrates effective information from different modal images and integrates salient and complementary features, which can more comprehensively describe the condition of lesions and make medical diagnosis results more reliable. This paper proposes a multimodal medical image fusion method based on image detail enhancement and dual‐branch feature fusion (DEDF). First, the source images are preprocessed by guided filtering to enhance important details and improve the fusion and visualization effects. Then, local extreme maps are used as guides to smooth the source images. Finally, a DEDF mechanism based on guided filtering and bilateral filtering is established to obtain multiscale bright and dark feature maps, as well as base images of different modalities, which are fused to obtain a more comprehensive medical image and improve the accuracy of medical diagnosis results. Extensive experiments, compared qualitatively and quantitatively with various state‐of‐the‐art medical image fusion methods, validate the superior fusion performance and effectiveness of the proposed method.

The role of medical image fusion in different applications like disorder treatment, surgical navigation, and diagnosis is critically increasing. Alzheimer’s disease has been achieved by clear study of structural and functional changes that are present in brain image. Multimodal medical image fusion considers merging of complementary information while removing the surplus artifacts to produce a solitary image which provides details of both spectral and spatial data. In this paper, multimodal medical image fusion method is based on rolling guidance filter and parameter adaptive pulse coupled neural networks. First, the source images are decomposed into base and detail images using rolling GF. The final detail image is obtained by using PA-PCNN, and final base image is obtained by using maximum fusion rule, combining them gives fusion image. The superiority of the proposed method is presented and is justified with respect to quality metrics. KeywordsMedical image fusionAlzheimer diseaseParameter adaptive PCNNRolling guidance filter

Image processing technology requires moreover the full image or the part of image which is to be processed from the user’s point of view like the radius of object etc. The main purpose of fusion is to diminish dissimilar error between the fused image and the input images. With respect to the medical diagnosis, the edges and outlines of the concerned objects is more important than extra information. So preserving the edge features of the image is worth for investigating the image fusion. The image with higher contrast contains more edge-like features. Here we propose a new medical image fusion scheme namely Local Energy Match NSCT based on discrete contourlet transformation, which is constructive to give the details of curve edges. It is used to progress the edge information of fused image by dropping the distortion. This transformation lead to crumbling of multimodal image addicted to finer and coarser details and finest details will be decayed into unusual resolution in dissimilar orientation. The input multimodal images namely CT and MRI images are first transformed by Non Sub sampled Contourlet Transformation (NSCT) which decomposes the image into low frequency and high frequency elements. In our system, the Low frequency coefficient of the image is fused by image averaging and Gabor filter bank algorithm. The processed High frequency coefficients of the image are fused by image averaging and gradient based fusion algorithm. Then the fused image is obtained by inverse NSCT with local energy match based coefficients. To evaluate the image fusion accuracy, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Correlation Coefficient parameters are used in this work .

The synthesis of visual information from multiple medical imaging inputs to a single fused image without any loss of detail and distortion is known as multimodal medical image fusion. It improves the quality of biomedical images by preserving detailed features to advance the clinical utility of medical imaging meant for the analysis and treatment of medical disorders. This study develops a novel approach to fuse multimodal medical images utilizing anisotropic diffusion (AD) and non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). First, the method employs anisotropic diffusion for decomposing input images to their base and detail layers to coarsely split two features of input images such as structural and textural information. The detail and base layers are further combined utilizing a sum-based fusion rule which maximizes noise filtering contrast level by effectively preserving most of the structural and textural details. NSCT is utilized to further decompose these images into their low and high-frequency coefficients. These coefficients are then combined utilizing the principal component analysis/Karhunen-Loeve (PCA/KL) based fusion rule independently by substantiating eigenfeature reinforcement in the fusion results. An NSCT-based multiresolution analysis is performed on the combined salient feature information and the contrast-enhanced fusion coefficients. Finally, an inverse NSCT is applied to each coefficient to produce the final fusion result. Experimental results demonstrate an advantage of the proposed technique using a publicly accessible dataset and conducted comparative studies on three pairs of medical images from different modalities and health. Our approach offers better visual and robust performance with better objective measurements for research development since it excellently preserves significant salient features and precision without producing abnormal information in the case of qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Medical image fusion (MIF) significantly improves diagnosis accuracy by combining complementary data from several imaging modalities. However, the conventional fusion methods often fail to maintain the edge details, uniformity of texture and most relevant characteristics. To overcome these challenges, a novel multi-modality medical image fusion using Triple generator network (MIMO-TGAN) is proposed for accurate brain abnormality detection. The proposed MIMO-TGAN uses the multi-modality images such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images for MIF process. Initially, the gathered MRI and CT images are denoised with scalable range-based adaptive trilateral (SCRAT) filter and PET images are processed by multi-scale retinex (MSR) technique. The proposed MIMO-TGAN model contains three generators with a discriminator and an abnormality detection phase. The Generator-1 consists of grouped convolutional with different attention blocks for retrieving the relevant features from MRI and CT images to generate a synthesized image. Simultaneously, Generator-2 retrieves the most important voxel features from PET images and MRI images to generate another synthesized image. Finally, Generator-3 is designed to combine the both synthesized images from two generators by using four fusion rules to accurately detect brain abnormalities. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed MIMO-TGAN achieves an accuracy of 99.43% and 98.24% for dataset-1and dataset-2 respectively. Moreover, the proposed MIMO-TGAN achieves the entropy values of 7.05 and 6.84 for dataset-1 and dataset-2, and overall SSIM of 0.94 that indicates superior fusion quality results compared to existing methods.

DFENet: A dual-branch feature enhanced network integrating transformers and convolutional feature learning for multimodal medical image fusion

Multi-modality medical image fusion (MMIF) methods were widely used in a variety of clinical settings. For specialists, MMIF could provide an image containing anatomical and physiological information that can help develop diagnostic procedures. Different models linked to MMIF were proposed previously. However, there would be a need to enhance the functionality of prior methodologies. In this proposed model, a unique fusion model depending upon optimal thresholding and deep learning approaches are presented. An enhanced monarch butterfly optimization (EMBO) determines an optimal threshold with fusion rules as in shearlet transform. The efficiency of the fusion process mainly depends on the fusion rule and the optimization of the fusion rule can improve the efficiency of the fusion. The extraction element of the deep learning approach was then utilized to fuse high- and low-frequency sub-bands. The fusion technique was carried out using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The studies were carried out for MRI and CT images. The fusion results were attained and the proposed model was proved to offer effective performance with reduced values of error and improved values of correlation.