Medical Image Fusion: Wavelet Based Techniques

Image fusion has become a common term used within medical diagnostics and treatment. The term is used when multiple patient images are registered and overlaid or merged to provide additional information. Fused images may be created from multiple images from the same imaging modality, or by combining information from multiple modalities, such as magnetic resonance image (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). In radiology and radiation oncology, these images serve different purposes. For example, CT images are used more often to ascertain differences in tissue density while MRI images are typically used to diagnose brain tumors. In this book, preprocessing or removing noise from the CT/MRI/US medical images with wavelets followed by fusing them based on two important techniques viz. lifting wavelet transform and double density dual tree discrete wavelet transform is analyzed for better performance.