Multimodal medical image fusion in NSST domain with structural and spectral features enhancement

Abstract

For the past 25 years, medical imaging has been extensively used for clinical diagnosis. The main difficulties in medicine are accurate disease recognition and improved therapy. Using a single imaging modality to diagnose disease is challenging for clinical personnel. In this paper, a novel structural and spectral feature enhancement method in NSST Domain for multimodal medical image fusion (MMIF) is proposed. Initially, the proposed method uses the Intensity, Hue, Saturation (IHS) method to generate two pairs of images. The input images are then decomposed using the Non-Subsampled Shearlet Transform (NSST) method to obtain low frequency and high frequency sub-bands. Next, a proposed Structural Information (SI) fusion strategy is employed to Low Frequency Sub-bands (LFS's). It will enhance the structural (texture, background) information. Then, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is employed as a fusion rule to High Frequency Sub-bands (HFS's) to obtain the pixel level information. Finally, the fused final image is obtained by employing inverse NSST and IHS. The proposed algorithm was validated using different modalities containing 120 image pairs. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrated that the algorithm proposed in this research work outperformed numerous state-of-the-art MMIF approaches.