PET and MRI image fusion based on combination of 2-D Hilbert transform and IHS method

BACKGROUND: The process of medical image fusion is combining two or more medical images such as Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and mapping them to a single image as fused image. So purpose of our study is assisting physicians to diagnose and treat the diseases in the least of the time. METHODS: We used Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) as input images, so fused them based on combination of two dimensional Hilbert transform (2-D HT) and Intensity Hue Saturation (IHS) method. Evaluation metrics that we apply are Discrepancy (D(k)) as an assessing spectral features and Average Gradient (AG(k)) as an evaluating spatial features and also Overall Performance (O.P) to verify properly of the proposed method. RESULTS: In this paper we used three common evaluation metrics like Average Gradient (AG(k)) and the lowest Discrepancy (D(k)) and Overall Performance (O.P) to evaluate the performance of our method. Simulated and numerical results represent the desired performance of proposed method. CONCLUSIONS: Since that the main purpose of medical image fusion is preserving both spatial and spectral features of input images, so based on numerical results of evaluation metrics such as Average Gradient (AG(k)), Discrepancy (D(k)) and Overall Performance (O.P) and also desired simulated results, it can be concluded that our proposed method can preserve both spatial and spectral features of input images.