A new method for medical image fusion based on Gaussian blur filter and Robinson compass operator

Abstract

Medical image fusion is a process of extracting features from multi-modal medical images and combining them into a composite image. It brings huge support in medical imaging and clinical diagnosis. However, the extraction of both structural and functional information from input MRI and PET images using multi-scale transform fusion methods poses a challenge of providing high-quality decomposition layers since during the decomposition process, images can still lose information such as blur or noise at the edges of the image. To address this limitation, we present a new method to improve the visual information fidelity of medical image fusion. Firstly, the YCbCr color space is utilized to prevent distortion when merging color and grey images. The second algorithm uses the CLAHE model, which allows the input images to have good contrast. Then, a Gaussian blur filter is employed to decompose the images into base and detail layers. The use of Gaussian blur ensures a smoothing filter of the edges. After that, the Robinson compass operator is applied to create the fusion rule of detail components. Finally, the fused base and detail layers are concatenated together to form the final composite image. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the latest methods in bringing visual information fidelity of the input images to the fused image, which is helpful in supporting doctors and radiologists in visual analysis of the medical images.