Spine medical image fusion using wiener filter in shearlet domain

Abstract

Medical image fusion combines both functional and anatomical structures in different imaging modalities such as Computer Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI). In spine medical image fusion, CT and MR of the spine provides complementary information that assist to diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Thus, spine medical image fusion is an essential technique that integrate the anatomical details of CT image and the functional information of MR image to a fused image with high functional and anatomical structures. This paper proposes a spine medical image fusion using wiener filter (WF) in shearlet domain. Shearlet transform (ST) obtains the shearlet subbands from CT and MR source images. A unique fusion strategy is devised for lowpass ST subbands. The processing of highpass ST subbands are considered in detail. Finally, the fused image achieved by inverse shearlet transform (IST). By evaluating with mainly some familiar techniques with regard to some quality assessment indexes, simulation and experimental results on spine images are presented the excellence of proposed technique.