Medical image fusion with deep neural networks

Abstract

Medical image fusion aims to fuse multiple images from a single or multiple imaging modes to enhance their corresponding clinical applications in diagnosing and evaluating medical problems, a trend that has attracted increasing attention. However, most recent medical image fusion methods require prior knowledge, making it difficult to select image features. In this paper, we propose a novel deep medical image fusion method based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for directly learning image features from original images. Specifically, source images are first decomposed by low rank representation to obtain the principal and salient components, respectively. Following that, the deep features are extracted from the decomposed principal components via DCNN and fused by a weighted-average rule. Then, considering the complementary between the salient components obtained by the low rank representation, a simple yet effective sum rule is designed to fuse the salient components. Finally, the fused result is obtained by reconstructing the principal and salient components. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art medical image fusion approaches in terms of both objective indices and visual quality.