Medical image fusion based on laws of texture energy measures in stationary wavelet transform domain

Medical image fusion is widely used in various clinical procedures for the precise diagnosis of a disease. Image fusion procedures are used to assist real-time image-guided surgery. These procedures demand more accuracy and less computational complexity in modern diagnostics. Through the present work, we proposed a novel image fusion method based on stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and texture energy measures (TEMs) to address poor contrast and high-computational complexity issues of fusion outcomes. SWT extracts approximate and detail information of source images. TEMs have the capability to capture various features of the image. These are considered for fusion of approximate information. In addition, the morphological operations are used to refine the fusion process. Datasets consisting of images of seven patients suffering from neurological disorders are used in this study. Quantitative comparison of fusion results with visual information fidelity-based image fusion quality metric, ratio of spatial frequency error, edge information-based image fusion quality metric, and structural similarity index-based image fusion quality metrics proved the superiority. Also, the proposed method is superior in terms of average execution time to state-of-the-art image fusion methods. The proposed work can be extended for fusion of other imaging modalities like fusion of functional image with an anatomical image. Suitability of the fused images by the proposed method for image analysis tasks needs to be studied.