Image fusion improvements applied at the generation of 3D thermal models.

The application of multimodal image registration to various medical applications has been investigated. Image fusion involving 3D thermal and MRI/CT images allows the extraction of both functional and anatomical information, which may become a powerful tool to aid in clinical diagnoses. This paper presents innovations at the image fusion methodology, which currently requires that both imaging modalities are represented and visualized at the same 3D viewing projection. The proposed solution is based and compared with two different viewing projections: orthogonal and perspective. The methodology requires that the thermographic images (or photographs) are visualized in the orthogonal view, in order to match with the 2D projected images (using range images) from MRI/CT. The results obtained have shown significant improvements in the 3D thermal models, when compared and evaluated with the perspective approach. This allowed the generation of more accurate 3D models, which match both the geometry and texture (functional temperature information). Since it is desirable to combine or unify more than one imaging modality, these 3D multimodal models may have a strong impact in many clinical applications.