A Comparative Analysis of Multimodality Medical Image Fusion Methods

Medical image fusion has been used to derive useful information from multimodality medical image data. The idea is to improve the image content by fusing images like computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides better information on soft tissue whereas computed tomography (CT) provides better information about denser tissue. Fusing these two types of images creates a composite image which is more informative than any of the input signals provided by a single modality. For this reason, image fusion has become a common process used within medical diagnostics and treatment. In this paper, Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform using Wrapper algorithm based image fusion technique, has been implemented, analyzed and compared with Wavelet based Fusion Technique. Fusion of images taken at different resolutions, intensity and by different techniques helps physicians to extract the features that may not be normally visible in a single image by different modalities. This work aims at fusion of registered CT and MRI Images. This fused image can significantly benefit medical diagnosis and also the further image processing such as, visualization (colorization), segmentation, classification and computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). The fusion performance is evaluated on the basis of the root mean square error (RMSE) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR).