Multi-Modal Medical Image Fusion Using 3-Stage Multiscale Decomposition and PCNN with Adaptive Arguments

Abstract

In the current era of technological development, medical imaging plays an important role in many applications of medical diagnosis and therapy. In this regard, medical image fusion could be a powerful tool to combine multi-modal images by using image processing techniques. But, conventional approaches failed to provide the effective image quality assessments and robustness of fused image. To overcome these drawbacks, in this work three-stage multiscale decomposition (TSMSD) using pulse-coupled neural networks with adaptive arguments (PCNN-AA) approach is proposed for multi-modal medical image fusion. Initially, nonsubsampled shearlet transform (NSST) is applied onto the source images to decompose them into low frequency and high frequency bands. Then, low frequency bands of both the source images are fused using nonlinear anisotropic filtering with discrete Karhunen–Loeve transform (NLAF-DKLT) methodology. Next, high frequency bands obtained from NSST are fused using PCNN-AA approach. Now, fused low frequency and high frequency bands are reconstructed using NSST reconstruction. Finally, band fusion rule algorithm with pyramid reconstruction is applied to get final fused medical image. Extensive simulation outcome discloses the superiority of proposed TSMSD using PCNN-AA approach as compared to state-of-the-art medical image fusion methods in terms of fusion quality metrics such as entropy (E), mutual information (MI), mean (M), standard deviation (STD), correlation coefficient (CC) and computational complexity.