Brain MRI and CT Image Fusion Using Multiscale Local Extrema and Image Statistics

In medical applications such as radiotherapy and guided-image surgery, data fusion for diagnostic imaging has emerged as a critical issue. Because the objective of medical image fusion is to improve patient diagnosis accuracy, the fused image is created by preserving the source images' prominent details and features. It has been demonstrated that the Multi-Level Local Extrema representation has numerous advantages over traditional image modeling approaches. We propose an innovative MLE-based fusion method for multimodal medical images in this paper. In the MLE schema, the proposed algorithm decomposes source images into coarse and detailed layers, then fuses the source images using weights calculated from these detail images using image statistics. We visually and quantitatively compared the efficacy of the suggested approach to that of existing methods using five different types of medical images from various sources. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms other current typical schemes in terms of both qualitative image quality and objective evaluation.