MsgFusion: Medical Semantic Guided Two-Branch Network for Multimodal Brain Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion plays an essential role in medical image analysis and application, where computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and positron emission tomography (PET) are commonly-used modalities, especially for brain disease diagnoses. Most existing fusion methods do not consider the characteristics of medical images, and they adopt similar strategies and assessment standards to natural image fusion. While distinctive medical semantic information (MS-Info) is hidden in different modalities, the ultimate clinical assessment of the fusion results is ignored. Our MsgFusion first builds a relationship between the key MS-Info of the MR/CT/PET/SPECT images and image features to guide the CNN feature extractions using two branches and the design of the image fusion framework. For MR images, we combine the spatial domain feature and frequency domain feature (SF) to develop one branch. For PET/SPECT/CT images, we integrate the gray color space feature and adapt the HSV color space feature (GV) to develop another branch. A classification-based hierarchical fusion strategy is also proposed to reconstruct the fusion images to persist and enhance the salient MS-Info reflecting anatomical structure and functional metabolism. Fusion experiments are carried out on many pairs of MR-PET/SPECT and MR-CT images. According to seven classical objective quality assessments and one new subjective clinical quality assessment from 30 clinical doctors, the fusion results of the proposed MsgFusion are superior to those of the existing representative methods.