A comprehensive survey of multi-modality medical image fusion: methods, challenges, and applications

Medical image fusion (MIF) is the process of fusing two medical pictures from different modalities into one image. This technology tries to produce a fused output image from two source images that contain more effective and relevant information. This image is used in the healthcare industry, specifically for disease diagnosis. The main challenge is using a single image modality to diagnose diseases accurately. The fused image includes spectral and structural information for the source images to help doctors with disease diagnosis problems. Positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are some of the medical imaging modalities. Each modality has its benefits and drawbacks. Researchers have presented different MIF techniques that obtain high fusion results in the MIF field. This paper is a comprehensive survey of multiple state-of-the-art MIF techniques in the spatial and transform domains. It also discusses the main MIF evaluation metrics. Finally, quantitative and qualitative evaluations for some of these techniques are obtained.