Nuclear Medicine, Philips Healthcare, 595 Miner Road, Cleveland, OH 44143, USA.
J Digit Imaging. 2011 Feb;24(1):50-7. doi: 10.1007/s10278-009-9259-8. Epub 2010 Jan 14.
Color blending is a popular display method for functional and anatomic image fusion. The underlay image is typically displayed in grayscale, and the overlay image is displayed in pseudo colors. This pixel-level fusion provides too much information for reviewers to analyze quickly and effectively and clutters the display. To improve the fusion image reviewing speed and reduce the information clutter, a pixel-feature hybrid fusion method is proposed and tested for PET/CT images. Segments of the colormap are selectively masked to have a few discrete colors, and pixels displayed in the masked colors are made transparent. The colormap thus creates a false contouring effect on overlay images and allows the underlay to show through to give contours an anatomic context. The PET standardized uptake value (SUV) is used to control where colormap segments are masked. Examples show that SUV features can be extracted and blended with CT image instantaneously for viewing and diagnosis, and the non-feature part of the PET image is transparent. The proposed pixel-feature hybrid fusion highlights PET SUV features on CT images and reduces display clutters. It is easy to implement and can be used as complementarily to existing pixel-level fusion methods.
颜色混合是功能和解剖图像融合的一种常用显示方法。底层图像通常以灰度显示，而覆盖图像以伪彩色显示。这种像素级融合为审阅者提供了太多信息，使得他们难以快速有效地进行分析，并使显示变得混乱。为了提高融合图像的审阅速度并减少信息混乱，提出并测试了一种用于 PET/CT 图像的像素-特征混合融合方法。选择屏蔽色图的片段以获得少数离散颜色，并使显示在屏蔽颜色中的像素变为透明。因此，色图在覆盖图像上产生了虚假的轮廓效果，并允许底层图像透过显示，从而为轮廓提供解剖学背景。PET 标准化摄取值（SUV）用于控制屏蔽色图片段的位置。示例表明，可以提取和混合 SUV 特征与 CT 图像进行即时查看和诊断，并且 PET 图像的非特征部分是透明的。所提出的像素-特征混合融合方法突出了 CT 图像上的 PET SUV 特征，并减少了显示混乱。它易于实现，可以作为现有像素级融合方法的补充。
