Nonsubsampled shearlet domain fusion techniques for CT-MR neurological images using improved biological inspired neural model

The fusion of multimodality medical images performs a very crucial role in the clinical diagnosis, analysis and the treatment of especially in critical diseases. It is considered as an assisted approach for the radiologist by providing the composite images having significant diagnostic information acquired from the source images. The main purpose of this work is to develop an efficient framework for fusing the multimodal medical images. Three different fusion techniques are proposed in this paper that presents the CT and MR medical image fusion in nonsubsampled shearlet transform (NSST) domain using the adaptive spiking neural model. The NSST having different features and a competent depiction of the image coefficients provides several directional decomposition coefficients. Maximum selection approach and regional energy are utilized for low frequency coefficients fusion. Spatial frequency, novel modified spatial frequency and novel sum modified Laplacian motivated spiking model are used for every high frequency subimage component. Finally, fused images are reconstructed by applying inverse NSST. The performance of proposed fusion techniques is validated by extensive simulations performed on different CT-MR image datasets using proposed and other thirty seven existing fusion approaches in terms of both the subjective and objective manner. The results revealed that the proposed techniques provide better visualization of resultant images and higher quantitative measures compared to several existing fusion approaches. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences.