A comparison on medical image fusion of CT and MRI images using transform domain techniques

This paper presents a comparative analysis on medical image fusion of CT and MRI images using various transform domain techniques. Image fusion is the process of combining two images to form a single image. The new image will be more informative than these two input images. CT image provides better information about denser tissue and it is not good for soft tissues. MRI image provides better information about the blood vessels, brain, heart, spinal cord and other internal organs and it is less accurate for bones. These two images are fused into a new image to improve the information content for diagnosis. Varieties of algorithms such as Discrete Wavelet Transform, Pyramid Wavelet Transform, Stationary Wavelet Transform, Curvelet Transform and Contourlet Transform are available to fuse two images. The fusion rule, Select-Maximum is used. The work is implemented using MATLAB. The results are compared by using various performance measures such as Image Quality Index (IQI), Mutual Information (MI), Fusion Index (FI), Fusion Symmetry (FS), Fusion Factor (FF), Standard Deviation (SD), Entropy (EN), Root Mean Square Error(RMSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).