A Novel Multimodal Medical Image Fusion Method Based on Detail Enhancement and Dual‐Branch Feature Fusion

Abstract

ABSTRACT Multimodal medical image fusion integrates effective information from different modal images and integrates salient and complementary features, which can more comprehensively describe the condition of lesions and make medical diagnosis results more reliable. This paper proposes a multimodal medical image fusion method based on image detail enhancement and dual‐branch feature fusion (DEDF). First, the source images are preprocessed by guided filtering to enhance important details and improve the fusion and visualization effects. Then, local extreme maps are used as guides to smooth the source images. Finally, a DEDF mechanism based on guided filtering and bilateral filtering is established to obtain multiscale bright and dark feature maps, as well as base images of different modalities, which are fused to obtain a more comprehensive medical image and improve the accuracy of medical diagnosis results. Extensive experiments, compared qualitatively and quantitatively with various state‐of‐the‐art medical image fusion methods, validate the superior fusion performance and effectiveness of the proposed method.