title: Spiking Cortical Model Based Multimodal Medical Image Fusion by Combining Entropy Information with Weber Local Descriptor.
abstract: Multimodal medical image fusion (MIF) plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and therapy. Existing MIF methods tend to introduce artifacts, lead to loss of image details or produce low-contrast fused images. To address these problems, a novel spiking cortical model (SCM) based MIF method has been proposed in this paper. The proposed method can generate high-quality fused images using the weighting fusion strategy based on the firing times of the SCM. In the weighting fusion scheme, the weight is determined by combining the entropy information of pulse outputs of the SCM with the Weber local descriptor operating on the firing mapping images produced from the pulse outputs. The extensive experiments on multimodal medical images show that compared with the numerous state-of-the-art MIF methods, the proposed method can preserve image details very well and avoid the introduction of artifacts effectively, and thus it significantly improves the quality of fused images in terms of human vision and objective evaluation criteria such as mutual information, edge preservation index, structural similarity based metric, fusion quality index, fusion similarity metric and standard deviation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China. zxmboshi@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Xuming
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China. M201471648@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Jinxia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China. M201571646@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zhiwen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China. zhufei@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Fei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zhu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging; D019277:Entropy; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D064847:Multimodal Imaging; D013997:Time Factors; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed
keywords: Weber local descriptor; entropy; multimodal medical image fusion; spiking cortical model; weighting fusion