A novel multi-modal medical image fusion method based on shift-invariant shearlet transform

Abstract

Medical image fusion plays an important role in clinical applications, such as image-guided surgery, image-guided radiotherapy, non-invasive diagnosis and treatment planning. Shearlet is a novel multi-scale geometric analysis (MGA) tool proposed recently. In order to overcome the drawback of the shearlet-based fusion methods that the pseudo-Gibbs phenomenon is easily caused around the singularities of the fused image, a new multi-modal medical image fusion method is proposed in shift-invariant shearlet transform domain. First, the original images are decomposed into lowpass sub-bands and highpass sub-bands; then, the lowpass sub-bands and high sub-bands are combined according to the fusion rules, respectively. All the operations are performed in shift-invariant shearlet domain. The final fused image is obtained by directly applying inverse shift-invariant shearlet transform to the fused lowpass sub-bands and highpass sub-bands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can not only suppress the pseudo-Gibbs phenomenon efficiently, but perform better than the popular wavelet transform-based method, contourlet transform-based method and non-subsampled contourlet transform-based method.