X-Ray and Fluorescent Molecular Tomography Image Fusion

This paper describes a new method developed for fusion of X-ray and fluorescent molecular tomography (FMT) images. For easier diagnostics, images obtained from X-ray and FMT sources are fused to generate perceptibly informative image display using the spatial and spectral domain properties of the images. The basic premise in this research originates from the fact that in medical imaging not all the spatial and spectral properties are present in different image sensing modalities. X-ray images are inherently in grayscale with no color information and soft tissues being transparent. This makes it difficult to localize tissue anomalies while the FMT provides a finer scanning result that yields higher resolution images showing the details of soft tissues. Fusing these two imaging modalities is expected to create visually distinctive results than each source provides alone. In particular, for color images of fluorescent molecular tomography, color clustering can play a significant role in improving the visual quality by means of segmentation. To obtain better matching shapes, X-ray and fluorescent molecular tomography images are fused using edge detection and color clustering methods. Experimental results obtained are highly promising with much improved visual image quality for more accurate diagnostic assessments.