Hybrid Multimodal Medical Image Fusion Method Based on LatLRR and ED-D²GAN

Abstract

In order to better preserve the anatomical structure information of Computed Tomography (CT) source images and highlight the metabolic information of lesion regions in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) source images, a hybrid multimodal medical image fusion method (LatLRR-GAN) based on Latent low-rank representation (LatLRR) and the dual discriminators Generative Adversarial Network (ED-D2GAN) is proposed. Firstly, considering the denoising capability of LatLRR, source images were decomposed by LatLRR. Secondly, the ED-D2GAN model was put forward as the low-rank region fusion method, which can fully extract the information contained by the low-rank region images. Among them, encoder and decoder networks were used in the generator; convolutional neural networks were also used in dual discriminators. Thirdly, a threshold adaptive weighting algorithm based on the region energy ratio is proposed as the salient region fusion rule, which can improve the overall sharpness of the fused image. The experimental results show that compared with the best methods of the other six methods, this paper is effective in multiple objective evaluation metrics, including the average gradient, edge intensity, information entropy, spatial frequency and standard deviation. The results of the two experiments are improved by 35.03%, 42.42%, 4.66%, 8.59% and 11.49% on average.

Keywords

• multimodal
• medical image fusion
• LatLRR
• GAN
• deep learning