A Novel GA-Based Optimized Approach for Regional Multimodal Medical Image Fusion With Superpixel Segmentation

For multimodal medical image fusion problems, most of the existing fusion approaches are based on pixel-level. However, the pixel-based fusion method tends to lose local and spatial information as the relationships between pixels are not considered appropriately, which has much influence on the quality of the fusion results. To address this issue, a region-based multimodal medical image fusion framework is proposed based on superpixel segmentation and a post-processing optimization method in this paper. In this framework, the average image of the source medical images is firstly obtained by a weighted averaging method. To effectively obtain homogeneous regions and preserve the complete information of image details, the fast linear spectral clustering(LSC) superpixel algorithm is carried out to segment the average image and get superpixel labels. For each region of the medical images, log-gabor filter(LGF) and sum modified laplacian(SML) are adopted to extract texture feature and contrast feature for the measurement of region importance. The most important regions are selected and the decision map is generated by comparison. Moreover, to get a more accurate decision map, a new post-processing optimized method based on genetic algorithm(GA) is given. A weighted strategy is applied to the extracted features and the weighting factor can be adaptively adjusted by GA. The effectiveness of the proposed fusion method is validated by conducting experiments on eight pairs of medical images from diverse modalities. In addition, seven other mainstream medical image fusion methods are adopted for comparing the performance of fusion. Experimental results in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance for multimodal medical image fusion problems.