5 research outputs found
Three-Dimensional Medical Image Fusion with Deformable Cross-Attention
Multimodal medical image fusion plays an instrumental role in several areas
of medical image processing, particularly in disease recognition and tumor
detection. Traditional fusion methods tend to process each modality
independently before combining the features and reconstructing the fusion
image. However, this approach often neglects the fundamental commonalities and
disparities between multimodal information. Furthermore, the prevailing
methodologies are largely confined to fusing two-dimensional (2D) medical image
slices, leading to a lack of contextual supervision in the fusion images and
subsequently, a decreased information yield for physicians relative to
three-dimensional (3D) images. In this study, we introduce an innovative
unsupervised feature mutual learning fusion network designed to rectify these
limitations. Our approach incorporates a Deformable Cross Feature Blend (DCFB)
module that facilitates the dual modalities in discerning their respective
similarities and differences. We have applied our model to the fusion of 3D MRI
and PET images obtained from 660 patients in the Alzheimer's Disease
Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset. Through the application of the DCFB
module, our network generates high-quality MRI-PET fusion images. Experimental
results demonstrate that our method surpasses traditional 2D image fusion
methods in performance metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and
Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). Importantly, the capacity of our
method to fuse 3D images enhances the information available to physicians and
researchers, thus marking a significant step forward in the field. The code
will soon be available online
Multi-focus image fusion based on non-negative sparse representation and patch-level consistency rectification
Most existing sparse representation-based (SR) fusion methods consider the local information of each image patch independently during fusion. Some spatial artifacts are easily introduced to the fused image. A sliding window technology is often employed by these methods to overcome this issue. However, this comes at the cost of high computational complexity. Alternatively, we come up with a novel multi-focus image fusion method that takes full consideration of the strong correlations among spatially adjacent image patches with NO need for a sliding window. To this end, a non-negative SR model with local consistency constraint (CNNSR) on the representation coefficients is first constructed to encode each image patch. Then a patch-level consistency rectification strategy is presented to merge the input image patches, by which the spatial artifacts in the fused images are greatly reduced. As well, a compact non-negative dictionary is constructed for the CNNSR model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion method outperforms some state-of-the art methods. Moreover, the proposed method is computationally efficient, thereby facilitating real-world applications