A computer tool for the fusion and visualization of thermal and magnetic resonance images

The measurement of temperature variation along the surface of the body, provided by digital infrared thermal imaging (DITI), is becoming a valuable auxiliary tool for the early detection of many diseases in medicine. However, DITI is essentially a 2-D technique and its image does not provide useful anatomical information associated with it. However, multimodal image registration and fusion may overcome this difficulty and provide additional information for diagnosis purposes. In this paper, a new method of registering and merging 2-D DITI and 3-D MRI is presented. Registration of the images acquired from the two modalities is necessary as they are acquired with different image systems. Firstly, the body volume of interest is scanned by a MRI system and a set of 2-D DITI of it, at orthogonal angles, is acquired. Next, it is necessary to register these two different sets of images. This is done by creating 2-D MRI projections from the reconstructed 3-D MRI volume and registering it with the DITI. Once registered, the DITI is then projected over the 3-D MRI. The program developed to assess the proposed method to combine MRI and DITI resulted in a new tool for fusing two different image modalities, and it can help medical doctors.