Performance comparison of different medical image fusion algorithms for clinical glioma grade classification with advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Abstract

Non-invasive glioma grade classification is an exciting area in neuroimaging. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of different medical image fusion algorithms for glioma grading purposes by fusing advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. Ninety-six subjects underwent an Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map and Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) MRI scan. After preprocessing, the different medical image fusion methods used to fuse ADC maps and SWI were Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Structure-Aware, Discrete Cosine Harmonic Wavelet Transform (DCHWT), Deep-Convolutional Neural network (DNN), Dual-Discriminator conditional generative adversarial network (DDcGAN), and Laplacian Re-Decomposition (LRD). The Entropy, standard deviation (STD), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and Relative Signal Contrast (RSC) were calculated for qualitative and quantitative analysis. We found high fused image quality with LRD and DDcGAN methods. Further quantitative analysis showed that RSCs in fused images in Low-Grade glioma (LGG) were significantly higher than RSCs in High-Grade glioma (HGG) with PCA, DCHWT, LRD, and DDcGAN. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve test highlighted that LRD and DDcGAN have the highest performance for glioma grade classification. Our work suggests using the DDcGAN and LRD networks for glioma grade classification by fusing ADC maps and SWI images.