FUSION OF PERPENDICULAR ANISOTROPIC MRI SEQUENCES

The quality of magnetic resonance images (MRI) is often limited by anisotropic voxels necessitated by acquisition considerations. Examination of the 3D anatomy and post-processing of such images is challenged by the partial volume effects due to such anisotropic voxels. We propose a method based on the separable wavelet transform to fuse anisotropic clinical images, which are often acquired in perpendicular directions, for example axial, sagittal and coronal, into a single fine-resolution image. We investigate several possible wavelet filters, fusion rules and the number of decomposition levels. Our method shows promising results of restoring features apparently lost due to the partial volume effect. © 2011 IEEE