Ripplet domain fusion approach for CT and MR medical image information

Abstract

Multimodal medical image fusion (MIF) plays an important role as an assistant for medical professionals by providing a better visualization of diagnostic information using different imaging modalities. The process of image fusion helps the radiologists in the precise diagnosis of several critical diseases and its treatment. In this paper, the proposed framework presents a fusion approach for multimodal medical images that utilize both the features extracted by the discrete ripplet transform (DRT) and pulse coupled neural network. The DRT having different features and a competent depiction of the image coefficients provides several directional high-frequency subband coefficients. The DRT decomposition can preserve more detailed information present in the reference images and further enhance the visualization of the fused images. Firstly, the DRT is applied to decompose the reference images into several low and high-frequency subimage coefficients that are fused by computing the novel sum modified Laplacian and novel modified spatial frequency motivated pulse coupled neural model. This model is used to preserve the redundant information also. Finally, fused images are reconstructed by applying the inverse DRT. The performance of the proposed fusion approach is validated by extensive simulation on the different CT-MR image datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides the better fused images in terms of visual quality along with the quantitative measures as compared to several existing fusion approaches.