IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2024 Oct;28(10):5729-5741. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2024.3426664. Epub 2024 Oct 3.
Medical image fusion has become a hot biomedical image processing technology in recent years. The technology coalesces useful information from different modal medical images onto an informative single fused image to provide reasonable and effective medical assistance. Currently, research has mainly focused on dual-modal medical image fusion, and little attention has been paid on trimodal medical image fusion, which has greater application requirements and clinical significance. For this, the study proposes an end-to-end generative adversarial network for trimodal medical image fusion. Utilizing a multi-scale squeeze and excitation reasoning attention network, the proposed method generates an energy map for each source image, facilitating efficient trimodal medical image fusion under the guidance of an energy ratio fusion strategy. To obtain the global semantic information, we introduced squeeze and excitation reasoning attention blocks and enhanced the global feature by primitive relationship reasoning. Through extensive fusion experiments, we demonstrate that our method yields superior visual results and objective evaluation metric scores compared to state-of-the-art fusion methods. Furthermore, the proposed method also obtained the best accuracy in the glioma segmentation experiment.
医学图像融合近年来已成为生物医学图像处理领域的研究热点。该技术将不同模态医学图像中的有用信息融合到一幅信息丰富的融合图像中,为临床诊断提供合理、有效的辅助决策。目前,研究主要集中在双模态医学图像融合上,而三模态医学图像融合由于具有更大的应用需求和临床意义,受到的关注较少。针对这一问题,该研究提出了一种用于三模态医学图像融合的端到端生成对抗网络。该方法利用多尺度 squeeze and excitation 推理注意力网络为每幅源图像生成一个能量图,并在能量比融合策略的指导下实现高效的三模态医学图像融合。为了获取全局语义信息,我们引入 squeeze and excitation 推理注意力模块,并通过原始关系推理增强全局特征。通过广泛的融合实验,我们证明与最先进的融合方法相比,该方法在视觉效果和客观评价指标得分上均具有优势。此外,该方法在脑胶质瘤分割实验中也取得了最佳的准确率。