Curvelet Based Image Fusion for Ultrasound Contrast Harmonic Imaging

Contrast harmonic imaging technology has been greatly developed in recent years for its better performance compared with tissue harmonic imaging. The unique imaging mode of contrast harmonic makes it possible to detect and predict the character of necrotic organs. More detailed information can be observed distinctly in tissue region when contrast harmonic imaging is employed, but the boundary is hard to distinguish since it is less sensitive than microbubble. Correspondingly, traditional ultrasound fundamental imaging mode can obtain clear boundary information while the internal information submerged in noises. A curvelet based image fusion method is proposed to obtain result images where both boundary and internal tissue information can be distinctly observed employing the fundamental image and the corresponding harmonic image. The experiments indicate that our proposed algorithm can include both kinds of important information for diagnosis in the result image than other fusion algorithms.