An efficient fusion algorithm combining feature extraction and variational optimization for CT and MR images

In medical image processing, image fusion is the process of combining complementary information from different or multimodality images to obtain an informative fused image in order to improve clinical diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, we propose a two‐stage fusion framework for computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images. First, the intensity and geometric structure features in both CT and MR images are extracted by the saliency detection method and structure tensor, respectively, and an initial fused image is obtained. Then, the initial fused image is optimized by a variational model which contains a fidelity term and a regularization term. The fidelity term is to retain the intensity of the initial fused image, and the regularization term is to constrain the gradient information of the fused image to approximate the MR image. The primal‐dual algorithm is proposed to solve the variational problem. The proposed method is applied on five pairs of clinical medical CT and MR‐T1\MR‐T2 images, and the comparison metrics SF, MI, [Formula: see text] , [Formula: see text] , and VIFF are calculated for assessment. Compared with seven state‐of‐the‐art methods, the proposed method shows a comprehensive advantage in preserving the salient intensity features, as well as texture structure information, not only in visual effects but also in objective assessments.