A curvelet transform approach for the fusion of MR and CT images

There are several medical imaging techniques such as the magnetic resonance (MR) and the computed tomography (CT) techniques. Both techniques give sophisticated characteristics of the region to be imaged. This paper proposes a curvelet based approach for fusing MR and CT images to obtain images with as much detail as possible, for the sake of medical diagnosis. This approach is based on the application of the additive wavelet transform (AWT) on both images and the segmentation of their detail planes into small overlapping tiles. The ridgelet transform is then applied on each of these tiles, and the fusion process is performed on the ridgelet transforms of the tiles. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed curvelet fusion approach to the traditional fusion techniques like the multiresolution discrete wavelet transform (DWT) technique and the principal component analysis (PCA) technique. The fusion of MR and CT images in the presence of noise is also studied and the results reveal that unlike the DWT fusion technique, the proposed curvelet fusion approach doesn't require denoising.