A REVIEW OF IMAGE FUSION TECHNIQUES AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS
Multimodality medical image fusion is utilized to improve the imaging quality and reduce randomness and redundancy in order to increment the clinical applicability of medical images for diagnosis and assessment of medical problems. Image fusion process can b e defined as the integration of information from a multiple of registered images without the introduction of distortion. It is often not possible to get an image that contains all relevant objects in focus. One way to surmount this problem is image fusion, in which one can acquire a series of pictures with different focus settings and fuse them to produce an image with elongated depth of field. Image fusion techniques can improve the quality and increment the application of these data. The importance of information offered by the medical images for diagnosis support can b e incremented by combining images from different compactable medical devices. Medical image fusion has been used to derive useful information from multimodality medical image data. Fused image will be represented in format capable for computer processing. Image fusion can be performed by means of wavelet transform, complex wavelet transform, non sub sampled contourlet transform etc. The resulting image contains more information compared to individual images. This paper describes different techniques and aspects of image fusion for multimodal medical imaging.