Medical Image Fusion for Brain Tumor Diagnosis Using Effective Discrete Wavelet Transform Methods

Abstract

Background: The field of clinical or medical imaging is beginning to experience significant advancements in recent years. Various medical imaging methods such as computed tomography (CT), X-radiation (X-ray), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) produce images with distinct resolution differences, goals, and noise levels, making it challenging for medical experts to diagnose diseases. Objective: The limitations of a single medical image modality have increased the necessity for medical image fusion. The proposed solution is to create a fusion method of merging two types of medical images, such as MRI and CT. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a software solution that swiftly identifies the precise region of a brain tumor, speeding up the diagnosis and treatment planning. Methods: The proposed methodology combined clinical images by using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT). This strategy depended on a multi-goal decay of the image information using DWT, and high-frequency sub-bands of the disintegrated images were combined using a weighted averaging method. Meanwhile, the low-frequency sub-bands were straight-forwardly replicated in the resulting image. The combined high-quality image was recreated using the IDWT. This method can handle images with various modalities and resolutions without the need for previous data. Results: The results showed that the outcomes of the proposed method were assessed by different metrics such as accuracy, recall, F1-score, and visual quality. The method showed a high accuracy of 98% over the familiar neural network techniques. Conclusion: The proposed method was found to be computationally effective and produced high-quality medical images to assist professionals. Furthermore, the method can be stretched out to other image modalities and exercised by hybrid techniques of wavelet transform and neural networks and used for different clinical image analysis tasks.   Keywords: CT and MRI, Image fusion, brain tumor, wavelet transform methods, medical images, machine learning, CNN