Survey and analysis of various image fusion techniques for clinical CT and MRI images
The research and development of biomedical imaging techniques requires more number of image data from medical image acquisition devices, like computed tomography (CT) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) positron emission technology, and single photon emission computed tomography. Multimodal image fusion is the process of combining information from various images to get the maximum amount of content captured by a single image acquisition device at different angles and different times or stages. This article analyses and compares the performance of different existing image fusion techniques for the clinical images in the medical field. The fusion techniques compared are simple or pixel based fusion, pyramid based fusion, and transform based fusion techniques. Four set of CT and MRI images are used for the above fusion techniques. The performance of the fused results is measured with seven parameters. The experimental results show that out of seven parameters the values of four parameters, such as average difference, mean difference, root mean square error, and standard deviation are minimum and the values of remaining three parameters, such as peak signal to noise ratio, entropy, and mutual information are maximum. From the experimental results, it is clear that out of 14 fusion techniques taken for survey, image fusion using dual tree complex wavelet transform gives better fusion result for the clinical CT and MRI images. Advantages and limitations of all the techniques are discussed with their experimental results and their relevance. (c) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 24, 193 202, 2014.
Int. J. Imaging Syst. Technol.