A fusion algorithm for medical structural and functional images based on adaptive image decomposition

Jun Qin, Xuanjing Shen, Haipeng Chen, Yingda Lv, Xiaoli Zhang

Abstract: Multimodal medical image fusion has been widely used as a powerful tool in the clinical applications because of its ability of enriching information of medical images. In this paper, a novel fusion algorithm dedicated to medical structural and functional image fusion. In the algorithm, textures from functional images are separated from the smooth component in structural images; then we need to segment the source images into two parts function-informative and function-uninformative regions by judging whether each pixel in the functional image contains informative color (black pixel is meaningless); then get the smooth version of fused image by filling the function-informative region with the color from functional image and filling the function-uninformative region with smooth component in structural images; finally, smooth version of fused image and textures from the functional image are combined to get the final fused image. The attractive features of the algorithms include its ability of both color and texture reservation and low time consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain state-of-the-art performance for medical structural and functional image fusion.